Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l'intermédiaire d'un sens est dans son essence affectivité. - Michel Henry

The culture is the whole of the enterprises and of the practices in which the abundance of life expresses itself, they all have as motivation the 'load', the 'over' which disposes inwardly the living subjectivity as a force ready to give unstintingly itself and constraint, under the load, to do it.

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.

By putting out of play not only the lifeworld but, more seriously, life itself or what we are, the play of knowledge is laden with significant consequences from the outset. If the auto-transformation and growth of culture is the business of life, what we have only glimpsed now appears with a striking clarity: since science has no relation to culture, the development of science has nothing to do with the development of culture. At the limit, one can imagine an extreme development of scientific knowledge that would go along with an atrophy of culture, with its regression in some domains or in all domains at once and, at the end of this process, its annihilation. This image is neither ideal nor abstract. It is the actual world we live in, a world which has just given rise to a new type of barbarism that is more serious that any that have preceded it and from which human beings risk dying from today.