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" "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.
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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Art will rediscover its way in a different type of nature (from the Galilean nature). The sensible qualities of this nature are not reduced to external features, as mere signs that are limited to 'representing' a foreign reality. These qualities are modes of life: impressions, tones and tonalities. This is what I mean: by tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature -- the true nature whose essence is Life -- is the cosmos. A dazzling claim from The Blaue Reiter Almanac, highlighted by Kandinsky himself, defines the Arche (or the Origin) where Art and Cosmos are identical: 'The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit'.
Let us consider a biology student who is reading a work about the genetic code. The student’s reading is the repetition through an act of her own consciousness of the complex processes of conceptualization and theorizing contained in the book, or those that are signified by the printed characters. But, in order for this reading to be possible, the student must turn the pages with her hands as she reads. The student must move her eyes in order to cover it and collect the lines of the text one after the other. When the student becomes tired, she will get up, leave the library, and take the stairs to the cafeteria where she will get some rest and something to eat and drink. The knowledge contained in the biology manual that was assimilated by the student during her reading is scientific knowledge. […] The knowledge that made possible de movements of the hands and the eyes, the act of getting up, climbing the stairs, drinking and eating, and resting is the knowledge of life.
The abstraction made by science is thus twofold. First, it is abstraction that defines the scientific world as such. Sensible qualities and the affective predicates that belong to them a priori are put out of play from the being of nature so that they only retain the forms capable of giving them an ideal determination. This nonconsideration of the subjective features of every possible world is indispensable from a methodological point of view, inasmuch as it allows for the establishment of procedures such as quantitative measurement that permit types of knowledge to be obtained that otherwise would be inaccessible. But, the infinite development of this ideal knowledge can only be pursued legitimately inasmuch as it remains clearly conscious of the limits of its field of investigation, limits that it has drawn itself. It cannot escape the fact that the setting aside of the sensible and affective properties of the world presupposes the setting aside of life itself, that is to say, of what makes up the humanity of the human being. That is the second abstraction made by science in the current sense: the abstraction of Life and of what alone truly matters.