Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on i… - Michel Henry

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Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on its own. It develops in such a way that all the virtualities and potentialities within it must be actualized, for them and for what they are, for their own sake, so that everything is done that can be done, that is to say, everything that nature can become. It is a matter of making gold, going to the moon, building self-guiding and self-monitoring missiles that can decide on the moment to self-destruction – and destroy us. Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness.

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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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Alternative Names: Phenomenological definition of God

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Additional quotes by Michel Henry

It is not at all paradoxical that this popular painting would stand in total isolation today, that there would be practically no audience to view or understand these masterpieces of the one who Argan says 'determined the fate of contemporary art', that the admirable rooms of the Lenbach villa would remain empty all the time or even that the Beaubourg half of the collection donated by Nina Kandinsky would stagnate in the reserves where no one can see them. It just so happens that people today are no longer popular, spontaneous, instinctive, real or alive. A mediation has separated people from themselves. The media has replaced the free play of life and its sensibility, with the substitute of an unreal, artificial, stereotypical, consumer world where life can only flee instead of realize itself.

To see what ought to be done without possessing the power to do so, to see what ought to be done while finding oneself deprived (in and through this seeing, in and through this commandment) of the ability to execute it – this is the dramatic and desperate situation in which the Law has placed each person, despite the fact that it is addressed to him from outside as a transcendent Law. A Law that defines the infraction and the crime, that opens before people the gaping possibility without giving them the power to avoid either, is a cursed Law. An absence of Law would be better, a state of innocence in which the possibility of crime was not every moment within sight. The Law, on the contrary, curses all those who do not put it into practice – in fact, it curses everybody, since it gives nobody the power to follow it. The Law multiples crime, as the Apostle says in a striking phrase: “The law was added so that trespass might increase” (Romans 5:20).

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