Barbarism Today III
What has never been seen
“Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life.”
(Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 31)
Cultures rise, and cultures fall. This is history, the cyclical rise and fall of cultures. But this time around, Michel Henry tells us, “what unfolds before our eyes is quite different.” (Henry, La Barbarie, 8. All translations from the French are my own). You feel intuitively, that something is different. You know, that something is deeply wrong. Will there still be the possibility to create anew, when we stand in the ashes of what is burning before our eyes? The corruption, the destruction, the ‘barbarism’, it is so all-encompassing, and so pervasive, that Michel Henry is forced to end La Barbarie with a question: “Can the world still be saved by a few?”(La Barbarie, 247)
(This is part three in a series on Michel Henry. If you are unfamiliar with Michel Henry, I suggest you start with reading part I and/or II in order to grasp this text better.)
I. What has never been seen before.
Michel Henry states that we witness a violent battle ‘to the death’, between culture and barbarism. What is culture? And what is barbarism? Culture, for Henry, is always a culture of life, in both senses. In culture, life is expressed, and it is life that is doing the expressing. Evidently, it are we as living beings that create culture, and what do we express in this culture? We express the essence of ourselves: life. As such, culture is nothing but the auto-expression of life itself; life expressing itself in the most intense and accurate manner it can.
“Culture designates the self-transformation of life, the movement by which life never ceases to modify itself in order to reach higher forms of realization and accomplishment, in order to increase itself.”
(La Barbarie, 14)
When we look at a ‘culture’, we say it is a beautiful culture when it is able to express the life that built the culture to a high degree. Ancient Greek culture expresses in all its art, philosophy, politics, architecture, etc., the Greek mode of life. The Greek way of life is on display everywhere. The same goes for Byzantine culture, Indian culture, etc. A weak culture on the other hand, is barely expressive of anything at all. Perhaps there is ‘no culture’, as there is no life being expressed.
This leads us to barbarism, which is the drive inherent to man, that is diametrically opposed to culture. Barbarism does not seek to express life, but seeks to diminish the expression of life, it seeks to flee from life. And consequently, what barbarism seeks to express, is not life, but what is non-living. In culture, the living seek to express life to the greatest degree. In barbarism, the living seek to flee from life as much as possible. What we call a great culture; a culture in which all branches of culture (art, philosophy, sports, architecture, music, science, etc.) are testament to the people’s yearning to express their lives. What we call barbarism; a ‘culture’ in which all cultural expressions are testament to the people’s desire to flee from their lives.
Here, Henry is very close to the analysis Jean-François Mattéi makes in La Barbarie intérieure. For Mattéi, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, are designations of inner attitudes, before they are designations of historically situated states of culture. In each and every person, there are these two opposed transcendental attitudes of civilization and barbarism. The former being the striving for growth, harmony, beauty, union, etc., and the latter being a striving for disorder, destruction, division, etc. Both live together in every individual, and a historical civilization occurs when the striving for civilization is dominant in the individuals constituting the culture. Barbarism occurs when the striving for barbarism is dominant in the individuals constituting the culture. There is this desire in you, to raise your head, and strive for what is higher, more good, and more beautiful. This is the transcendental root of civilization. And there is also this desire in you, to lower your head, to merely abide in what is given, this ‘laziness’, for which all striving is too much, and that thinks, that it is better to be done with any striving whatsoever. Better to burn it to the ground, than to put in the effort to make it better. This is barbarism.
Henry’s analysis is very similar. In each and every ‘life’, in every individual, there is the conflict between this striving to be done with itself, and this striving to grow and express itself to higher and higher degrees. Barbarism and culture, enmeshed in a fight since the dawn of time. But before this fight occurs on the surface of the earth, it takes place in each and every individual heart.
What is this fight? In many senses, it is the fight over life itself. Barbarism and culture are inner modalities of feeling of an individual life, and it is here that we must look for an answer. But what is this ‘life’ we are speaking about? What is this life, that can grow in culture, and decay in barbarism? This is surely not the life that biology speaks about. What biology thinks about when it speaks of life is constantly revized, definitions are changed when new ‘data’ emerge. For biology, what is dead today, was still living yesterday. It is not this life of science that we speak about, for if this were the case, there would be no idea of life before the emergence of modern biology. And all the ‘high cultures’ of the past, would be no cultures at all, for cultures are cultures of life. The scientific conception of life surely has an influence on culture, on how the living express themselves through the various branches of culture. But to begin with, “originally and in itself, culture has nothing to do with science, and does not result from science.” (La Barbarie, 15)
The life of culture, can not originally be the life of science, for the additional reason that only those who would be up to date with biology’s concept of ‘life’, would be able to engage in culture. This is evidently not the case. We know intuitively, that the scientifically illiterate artist is much more a man of culture, than the artistically illiterate scientist. The life we speak about, can not be the sole possession of one type of individual, gifted with a specialized type of knowledge such as ‘biology’ or ‘physics.’ Life, its being and its knowledge, must be something we all possess, for the striving for culture, and thus for life, takes place in every individual life.
This is the case, because we know life because we are ourselves alive. We know intuitively what life is, because we ourselves are alive. We know what life is, because we are a life. It is this simple fact, that we feel ourselves being alive, that constitutes our knowledge of life, and the possibility of culture. What is this feeling of ourselves being alive? It is merely the fact that we feel ourselves feeling. This is what it means to be alive. We say of things that they are alive when they possess this feeling of themselves, this “transcendental sensibility.”(La Barbarie, 15) When something does not posses this, it is dead. The table on which my arms rest, does not feel itself feeling my arms. For how could it? It is a dead object. I do feel my arms resting on this table, and I feel myself feeling this. Evidently, for I am alive. It is this most basic and evident of facts, that we know intuitively what life is, because we ourselves consist of this ‘knowledge’; the feeling of ourselves feeling, that constitutes the transcendental possibility for such a thing as culture, and for such a thing as barbarism. We are alive; and culture consists in the desire to express this fact. We are alive; and barbarism consists in the desire to be done with this fact.
II. Two roads: culture and barbarism
How does culture occur? And how does barbarism occur?
Life is the phenomenological absolute; before I am certain of anything else, I am absolutely certain of the fact that I feel myself feeling. And all other certainties I can possibly come to acquire, rest on this first certainty of life. And if life is the absolute, the first known reality from which everything else becomes explicable, then everything must be explained from within life. And likewise, the emergence of culture and barbarism must be explained from within life.
Once again, we ask, what is life? Life is, as we observed, nothing but this arche-feeling that we possess of feeling ourselves feeling. Life is this feeling of the force of undergoing ourselves, of self-undergoing. Life is the power of feeling oneself feeling, and life is nothing but this self-feeling, what Henry calls ‘auto-affection.’ Before I can feel the keys of this computer, I am this feeling of myself undergoing this feeling, and this is the essence of life. As such, life in its essence is nothing but this desire for itself. Life desires by essence to undergo itself, and it desires nothing else. In this process that is our essence, this primal force that drives us to undergo ourselves, that drives our feeling to feel itself, a surplus of energy is generated; life becomes so full of itself, to the point where it becomes almost unbearable. This is “the source-point of every culture, and of its possible reversion into barbarism.”(La Barbarie, 172)
At this point, a particular life, you or me, experiencing this unbearable surplus of energy, can choose to express this energy through what we call culture, or it can choose to dispense this energy in barbarism. “Two possibilities offer themselves to life to be lived, and two only.”(La Barbarie, 173). The two possibilities: culture and barbarism. This is important. With all the energy accumulated in us, we can do many things, evidently. We can do everything we want, but, everything we do can be undertaken only in two directions; the direction of culture, or the direction of barbarism. For example; we can create a painting, in many ways, but however we might do it, we either do it to express life, or we do it to flee from life. Culture or barbarism, this is the choice of direction underlying all other choices.
But what is the difference? And what determines whether we choose to pursue culture, or whether we choose barbarism?
The auto-affection of life undergoing itself is never neutral, it is never impersonal, but always marked by a quality of feeling, and consequently of aesthetic judgement. As we all know, the feeling of being alive is never neutral; it is either joyous or depressing, it is either energizing or tiring, it is either beautiful or ugly, it is either enjoyable or painful. From simply observing this fact of life, Henry gathers that life as auto-affection is perpetually moving between two extremes of feeling: joy and suffering. From the greatest joys, life flows into the greatest sufferings. And in the depths of the deepest sufferings, a turning happens in which all the energy transforms once again into joy. It is this perpetual flow of the one in to the other, that we as living beings, are condemned to undergo by essence. For we are nothing but life; this process of self-undergoing in which the greatest joys turn into the greatest horrors, and the greatest horrors are once again redeemed into joy. When we are at the peak of such joy, we love life, we desire it, and seek nothing but to express this life itself. Why? Ask anyone who is at such a point, and observe yourself phenomenologically when you are at such a point. The answer will be: there is no ‘why’ here, life is desired because of itself, and for no other reason, and it is expressed because there is nothing more worthy of expression, than this mere feeling of feeling ourselves feeling, of feeling ourselves alive. Not because of anything specific within life, but merely because of life itself. At such a point, even the past sufferings which we have undergone before we reached such joy, are loved and accepted, for we realize that the one consists only by grace of the other, that both are part of this one magnificent process of life auto-affecting itself throughout all different modalities of feeling, and this process in its entirety is embraced and loved. And we are joyous, for we realize that we ourselves, in our deepest essence, are this process. Standing there, full of life, we are filled with excitement for what Nietzsche called the ‘big-game hunt’:
“The human soul and its frontiers, the compass of human inner experience in general attained hitherto, the heights, depths and distances of this experience, the entire history of the soul hitherto and its still unexhausted possibilities.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, III, §45)
We desire nothing but this endless process of life, and we desire nothing but its expression, we desire nothing but to ‘hunt’ for even more experiences. We fear not for the future and the suffering that it will likely bring, we are excited, and we cannot wait to suffer some more. And this, is the origin of all true culture. Life being so full of itself, that it desires nothing but the expression of its own tragedy, with all its suffering, and all its joy, for one realizes that for all that is bad and all that is good, there is a unity underlying it, life itself.
The origin of barbarism on the other hand, is the reverse of this process. Barbarism too emerges at this ‘source-point’ in which the auto-affection of life becomes unbearable in its intensity. But, whereas with the origin of culture this intensity reaches its peak when life is at the peak of the modality of joy, barbarism finds its origin when the intensity reaches its peak when life is at the peak of the modality of suffering. When this happens, life does not desire to express itself. Rather, it seeks to be done with itself. It cannot bear itself, it resents itself. Henry calls barbarism “an unexpended energy”(La Barbarie, 177). For when life is at the peak of intensity in suffering, it does not know what to do with itself, it is too much, and instead of going deeper into it to quickly flow forward into the modality of joy, the instinct of barbarism seeks to be done with life altogether. It desires not to express this energy, rather, it desires to suppress this energy, it desires to flee from this energy. In the origin of culture, life is desired because of itself. In barbarism, life is hated for exactly the same reason, because it is itself, this undergoing of oneself feeling. And whereas in the origin of culture, life and all its past sufferings are looked at with joy at the realization that it is one magnificent process. In the suffering at the origin of barbarism, all the past joys are looked at with hatred, fuelled by the conviction that it is all part of one despicable and painful process. And there is no possibility of redeeming this pain in the realization of the unity of joy and suffering in life, for one refuses to go deeper into the feeling, to reach joy on the other end. Rather, one has decided to flee from the suffering.
It is a question of two modes of being, and two corresponding modes of acting. The one, a mode of acceptance and love of life, in which the natural instinct is to express this life, and to go even deeper into the feeling of life. The other, a mode of resentment and hatred for life, in which the natural instinct is to be done with life. There is this unbearable amount of energy; in culture we dive into it, in barbarism we flee from it.
We are speaking about modalities of individual feeling, but how does this concern what we normally call ‘a culture’? In order to grasp this, we must be done with seeing a strict difference between society and the individual. In Henry’s philosophy, there is only life, and life is always individual. We only know life through subjectivity, because life is the essence of subjectivity. And when we speak of society, we designate only a community of such subjectivities, a community of living subjectivities that, ideally, recognize their common essence as life. A common essence, in which their sense of community resides.
When the origin of culture as a love of life takes hold in an individual life, the desire is there to express this life to even more intense degrees, the desire is there to want more of ‘the big hunt’, to want more life. One naturally desires to give this life at which one marvels expression through one’s own proper activity: art, science, crafts, sports, etc. This expression is always necessarily of an individual life. It is always a self that feels the desire to express life, and this life is always the life of this self. The result is what we call an oeuvre, an individual body of work. But the deeper one recognizes this reality of life that one is seeking to express through various different expressions, the more one realizes that there is something common, in my oeuvre and in yours. In your labor and in my toil. What? Life itself as this auto-affection of itself. And here lies the creation of what we call ‘a culture’; through expressing life, our shared essence, as individuals, a culture at large is formed. Hence why in every veritable culture there is a certain order. There are expressions of highly particular individual modalities of feeling; the novelist writing about his love affairs, the cook making a meal intended for the specific palette of the population he is cooking for, the musician expressing the struggles of the times. The philosopher seeking to express the essence of all these activities through writing and speech. Religion seeking to give unity to all these activities by expressing the highest underlying reality, Life itself, through its symbols. And mysticism, the practice that seeks the highest realization of the auto-affection of Life in experience. Ethics, the teaching of how one should move as intelligently and smoothly as possible through the different modalities of feeling that constitute the undergoing of life. Architecture, the art that seeks to make us inhabit our essence not only in the deepest essence of our internal selves, but also in the world around us, by having the buildings we call home be an expression of who we are. In this manner, by expressing a common yet individual manner of undergoing life, a culture is formed. We all express our individual lives, but because we share in life in our deepest essence, our particular expressions naturally accord with each other. Of course, this accordance is not always a self-evident process, but a veritable work that knows its proper struggles, accompanied with pain and blood. Struggles, which can be overcome, because we have one shared goal and ideal; Life, and a structuring of culture that accords with the essence of life.
A culture rises. But evidently, cultures also fall. This happens when the love of life by the living that gives unity, now seeks to destroy a different unity. How so? Culture as the expression of life, is the result of a certain attitude vis-à-vis life: one of love. We love the life that we live, and seek to give expression to this life. Hence, culture is the expression of an individual manner of living. When such manners of living commune with each other, and find something of what is common, a shared culture is given birth. But, it is precisely this drive towards the expression of life in its greatest unity that leads to the downfall of ‘cultures.’ We have in us this desire for life, and the desire to express it. But at certain times in history, we look around, and what do we see? “Industry of the dead, cult of cemeteries, parching of the vital sources”, writes Italian Futurist Francesco Pratella.(The Art of Noise, 27) We look around, and what do we see? We see expressions of life, surely, but no expressions that we deem worthy. We see expressions that do not correspond to what we know of life. We see supposed expressions of life, but we think these expressions do not correspond with life. We see churches preaching about a God that is not the God we know in the experience of life. We see dishes being served that do not fit our taste or wellbeing. We see ideas being written down which we find destructive. In short, we see a culture which we deem not to be a culture of life. We see ‘a culture’, but it is no longer vital. This realization grows slowly in the hearts of many individuals, until an alternative vision is divined, and the former cultural unity is replaced by a new cultural unity. This happens either from within a certain geographically located culture, or by encountering and subverting a different culture one deems unworthy. What happens, in this simple process? ‘A culture’ is replaced, by replacing all particular cultural expressions (buildings, artworks, philosophies, etc). Why? Because the underlying manner of life that gave birth to these particular expressions is no longer accepted, and wants to be replaced by some other manner of life. A certain unity was there, and it is now torn down to replace it with some other unity, because the former unity has ceased expressing life in a way that accords with the lives of the living. But what is noteworthy here, is that a culture in its entirety is replaced. “It was each time the totality of values of a humanity which bloomed at the same time, and which decayed at the same time.”(La Barbarie, 8)
What happens here, is that what causes the decay, is not a blind desire for destruction, but the desire for the unity of life that seeks to replace what it deems a false unity. But, Henry claims, this time around, “what unfolds before our eyes is quite different.” (La Barbarie, 8)
III. Barbarism Today
A European, who travelled to India, might have missed the specific cultural expressions of his own place on earth. But still, in the deepest intercultural dialogue, he was able to feel at home, for he recognized in what he saw, a similar yearning to express the underlying unity of what we all value; Life, even though the ways in which this life is expressed are different. This is no longer possible. For what we witness, wherever we might go, is the yearning to be done with life. In the past, there might have been a fighting happening on the surface of the earth, a never-ending battle for the superiority of one’s own unity over the other’s, how could it be any way else in this world where all is strife? But in the depths of inter-cultural dialogue, there was the recognition of a unity. This is no longer possible, for what drives different cultures is no longer the underlying unity of life, but all that is foreign to it. For what drives ‘cultures’ today, is the desire to flee from life: barbarism.
The destruction we witness today, the ‘barbarism’, is not such a process of temporary decay in which one cultural unity is replaced by the desire of a different unity seeking to express itself. In such a ‘replacement’, behind the apparent nihilism, there is always the struggle of life seeking to express itself to a stronger degree than was hitherto achieved. Hence, we can speak of a war between cultures, a struggle between different expressions of life, between different manners of living, between different unities of culture. But in the barbarism of today, which Henry defines as ‘life turning against itself’, something different is happening; it is precisely the drive of self-hatred of a life that seeks to deny itself. There is no turning away from a life in order to replace it by a different life. No, there is only question of a life seeking to flee itself, seeking to replace life with what is foreign to life. How is this possible? Because what we witness is the dominion of the instinct of barbarism; the silent desire to be done with itself, that arises at the peak of life’s suffering. When Nietzsche said that nihilism was still to come, we can interpret this with Henry as follows; that as much as the instinct of barbarism is as old as life itself, raising its head every-time the undergoing of life becomes unbearably painful, what is new is the dominance of this instinct over the instinct of culture, in ‘a culture’ at large. What is new is not barbarism, what is new is the large-scale program to direct the life of humanity in the direction of barbarism. The hatred of life is no longer something the individual entertains by himself in his darkest moments, it is now a feeling that structures society at large.
How is this possible? And how is this only possible now? Henry states that the cause is the progress of modern Galilean science. This science offers the tools to make barbarism more than a desire undergone at the weakest points of individual life, and to structure all life according to this desire of barbarism. Modern science offers the tools, for the instinct of barbarism to be more than a mere sickness undergone periodically, and to become like a cancer, that eventually infects every cell of the body, that infects and re-structures every modality of life.
As we said, in the normal rise and fall of cultures, every aspect of a culture rises at once, and every aspect of a culture perishes at once. Because every branch of cultural activity is undertaken for and by the same unity: life, expressed in a manner of life, and replaced by a different unity: life, expressed in a different manner of life. But this time around, destruction is not brought about by a different unity of branches of culture, but only by one branch of cultural activity: science. It is a peculiar situation, that everyone can witness for himself; the arts decay, politics decays, labour decays, finance decays, religion decays, philosophy decays, etc. Yet, science, and specifically techno-science, progresses like it has never done before. Where usually everything decays at the same time, because it is the underlying unity that is decaying and being replaced by a different unity, now, everything decays but one thing: techno-science. Why? Because it is not an underlying unity that is being replaced by some other unity, but because the underlying unity is being eaten away. Not by a different unity, but by one single branch. The cultural drift is not interested in replacing all modalities of living by different modalities, it is only interested in progressing in one modality, science, and re-structuring the other modalities on the basis of this modality. Hence, there is not the replacement of a unity by a different unity, but only the rotting away of a unity by the over-dominance of one cell of its body. There is not the destruction of a manner of living by some other manner of living, there is the auto-destruction of life itself, eating itself up from the inside out. The destruction of life, not by the desire for a different life, but by the desire to be done with life: barbarism.
IV. Science: barbarism’s tool of choice
What was barbarism? The desire to be done with life, that arises from within the auto-affection of life itself. This desire has always been with life, it has always been born in life when the living were undergoing their lowest moments. But, says Michel Henry, it is with the emergence of modern science that barbarism finally finds the tools to become more than a mere fleeting moment in the history of an individual’s feeling, and to find a way to structure life in its entirety, even in its joyous moments. When Henry speaks of science, we must be careful in how we interpret this. Henry is not ‘anti-science’, he is merely very critical of the dominant ideology that science is the only way of knowing that leads to truth, and the only way of knowing that can serve as a guide for our actions. Science is the legislator, and science is the judge; this is what Henry is against. I touch on this more deeply in Barbarism Today I & II, for now, I quote Henry’s thoughts on the matter;
“Science as such has not the slightest relation with culture, and this is so because science develops itself outside of the sphere of culture. Such a situation, which we have tried to establish in the previous chapter, does not legitimize in itself any pejorative appreciation aiming to disqualify science, it does not mean any condemnation. It is only when the domain of science is understood as the only domain of truly existing being, and when this domain rejects into non-being and illusion the domain of life and culture, that the philosopher has the duty to intervene. It is not, once more, scientific knowledge as such which is in question, it is the ideology which is joined to science today, the ideology according to which science is the only veritable manner of knowing, that must destroy all other manners of knowing. For in the midst of the collapse of all beliefs, the modern world remains with only one conviction, universally held, that knowledge means science.” (La Barbarie, 42)
If you think Henry is exaggerating in claiming that in our ‘culture’, knowing means science, you need only look at our universities. Every student is given the choice; you either study the sciences, or you study the humanities. If you opt for the latter, you either study the scientific investigations of humanity (sociology, psychology, ‘scientific literary analysis’, ‘political-science’, etc.) or you study ‘obscure and antiquated’ domains of study such as theology, philosophy, or psychoanalysis. Most horrible is the situation in philosophy faculties: you either go the analytic road of truth studying philosophy of science, or you do continental history of philosophy. If you opt for the latter, you are not supposed to voice your opinions in a too convinced manner, for you are not searching for truth, you are searching for ‘meaning.’ Henry makes a hard opposition between the scientific ideology and culture. We might be tempted to critique him for making such a distinction, but we must be mindful, for it is we ourselves that have already made this distinction. Our world rests on this distinction, Henry merely observes it. We tell our children and our students; make a choice, science or humanities. You do ‘culture’, or you do ‘science’. You do meaning, or you do truth. Your choice. Before the opposition between culture and science is something Henry posits, it is merely a fact of our own ‘culture.’ The division is already made in how we live our lives, and it is specifically modern. Ancient cultures, by and large, saw no such division, because all branches of cultural activity found a unity in life. It was the investigation and expression of this life (culture) that lead one on all sorts of pursuits; art, philosophy, science, etc. This Idea: that there is an underlying unity (Life) to these diverse pursuits, and an overarching end (Life) was what held everything together.
It is this unity found in life, that ceases with the coming to dominance of modern science in modernity. The Idea of modern science, that comes to replace the Idea of the unity in life, is the Idea that such unity is to be done with, that the unity of life is to be done with, and that progress can only be made by separating all branches of activity, and that science can become the only veritable activity that leads to truth, and that can be allowed to guide our behaviour. Hence, it is no longer Life that guides us, but the Idea that we should distance ourselves as much as possible from Life, for this is what leads to truth. The modern Idea is precisely that culture is to be opposed, that culture is the domain of amusement and superstition, but that it can have no serious voice in the question of how we should live our lives, and that it can tell us nothing about truth.
We have been going too fast, modern science and barbarism, why this connection? Barbarism is life turning against life, life wanting to turn away from the undergoing of life that it is by essence. How does science work? It works by abstracting from everything sensible, from everything ‘living’, so as to remain with only mathematical idealities. When I want to investigate this table scientifically, I abstract from how it subjectively appears to me; white, hard, large, useful, ugly, etc., so as to remain only with objectively verifiable mathematical idealities. Thus, how objects appear to us phenomenologically, is abstracted from by overlaying a mathematical model. And in a next step, the phenomenological appearing is seen as illusory, whereas the mathematical model is seen as real. Galileo writes:
“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in he consciousness.”
(Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 23)
Of course, this is no entirely new idea. It is quite easy to come up with the idea that these qualities are not present in the things themselves, but are only added in our experience, or by our consciousness. But what is different with Galileo, is the value judgement that underlies this idea. The judgement that these qualities have nothing to tell us about truth, and that they are to play only a minimal role in ordering our lives. Leading one to Galileo’s famous words:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
(Galileo, The Assayer, 4)
The idea, that mathematics is immensely useful in discovering truth, is nothing new. What is new, is the idea that this is the only way to discover truth. And that if one doesn’t follow modern scientific method, one “wanders about in a dark labyrinth.” In this basic fact of scientific method, that phenomenological qualities are abstracted from, barbarism finds a useful tool to progress its instinct. Barbarism sought to be done with everything that makes life living, the undergoing of feeling and all its modalities. And with science, it can rationalize its own deepest longing. “Of course I want to be done with life, for science shows that life is an illusion, and what is real and valuable is what is non-living: triangles, circles, formulas, computers, etc.” One is reminded of the teenage nihilist who confidently boasts about the truths of cognitive sciences or buddhism, “nothing means anything, it is only one painful illusion”, not motivated by an honest search for truth, but only motivated by the desire to rationalize his own nihilism. In this way, barbarism rejoices with the arriving of modern mathematical science. And when it happens to be the case that much progress can be made with this new scientific method, both in the domain of pure knowledge and the domain of technology and industry, barbarism is once again convinced of its own truth. And, barbarism has now found a way in which it can order its own life, and the lives of others, on the basis of the barbaric instinct. It is with Galilean science that science can become truly applied, in the sense that it is no longer life that applies science, but science that is applied to life, to structure the entirety of our lives.
Let us look back to Galileo’s words. He says that if we do not understand mathematical science, the language of the universe, we will wander through a dark labyrinth. From what we have said about culture, Galileo’s words must sound suspicious. Modern mathematical science is a modern invention, did all people before the modern period wander through a dark labyrinth? Were all these cultures merely misguided children? Incapable of ordering their lives, of attaining truth? Incapable of expressing the world or God? Evidently not, but it is precisely the conviction that they were, that we can read between the words of Galileo, and that we notice everywhere in today’s world. The birth of modern science in minds like those of Galileo is inextricably tied up with the idea that pre-scientific cultures, were worth nothing.
Henry said that culture has nothing do with science, and that culture never results from science. Here, Henry is speaking about the modern mathematical sciences of nature such as laid out by Galileo. He can say this, because Galilean science and its underlying ideology, is precisely premised on an opposition against culture. It speaks of itself as, not being merely one valuable activity of humans among others, all useful for expressing life to greater degrees. No, everything is seen as a dark wandering through illusion, and it is only with science that light can come to emerge. Science makes a methodological abstraction from everything that makes life living, subjective qualities. To this methodological abstraction, modern scientific ideology adds the Idea that guiding one’s life by looking at subjective qualities amounts to wandering through a dark labyrinth. The methodological abstraction, becomes fuelled by a conviction of value; if we want truth and meaning, we must abstract from life. Remember that culture is always a culture of life. And hence, modern scientific ideology is, by essence, opposed to culture.
Modern scientific ideology has nothing to do with culture, and it is not born from culture. For it posits itself as being opposed to culture, and its ideology is born from the instinct of barbarism, from the desire to be done with life and its expression. Thus, Henry tries to show, that from its very birth in the modern age, science has been hijacked to be a tool for barbarism. Again, Henry is not anti-science. Since the birth of culture, science has been one branch among many in which humanity seeks to discover and express the mystery of life, alongside art, philosophy, religion, etc. What changes in modernity, is that science detaches itself from this unity given by life and culture, and opposes itself to it.
It is often claimed that science cannot give meaning; science, as the supreme method for the understanding to gather knowledge, can gather facts, but it cannot determine value. It cannot answer the ‘why?’ From Henry’s perspective, such a claim is not entirely true. Science is indeed merely a method to gather knowledge. But, as modern science, it is intrinsically tied up with the Idea of barbarism; that subjective life is a painful illusion to be done with, that truth resides in non-living objectivity, and that meaning is to be found in fleeing from life. The modern scientific ideology is not a value-less ‘disinterested search for knowledge’. There is a goal behind the scientific ideology: to be done with life, barbarism.
If science is the method of gathering factual knowledge, it is impotent by itself. This is so because the power to understand would be impotent, if there were not a different power that drives the understanding to know this or that. Scientific method is merely a net, but there must a person, a life, which throws out the net in a certain direction. As Kant would say, we do not merely want to know, we also want to know why we want to know. It is this ‘why’ that is given by Ideas, highest ideals and goals, whose presence drives us to know. Hence, in culture, it is the Idea of Life that drives us to express this Idea to greater and greater degrees through all the different activities of cultural expression: art, philosophy, science, architecture, sports, etc. Life is at once the source of our activities, and the end of our activities.
In this sense, no type of knowledge or method can be without an Idea, it is an impossibility. It is a possibility that the Idea of Life drives the sciences; out of the joy of the undergoing of life the desire arises to understand this life and all its manifestations in more depth, and hence one undertakes the study of the sciences. However, the same science can be driven by a different Idea, and this is what happens with modern science when it becomes a tool for barbarism. As Henry writes:
“The mad idea to no longer feel oneself feeling, to renounce once proper condition of being life. This Idea is immanent to Galilean science.”
(La Barbarie, 119).
Science, as method, is merely a method. And such a method can be undertaken from a life-affirming Idea: culture, to express life to greater and greater degrees. But it can also be undertaken from a life-denying Idea: barbarism, to diminish the expression of life as much as possible.
“The science which rests on such an Idea rests on a pathos, it is itself pathos and it is as such, that it must be understood.”
(La Barbarie, 120.)
Science is a method, but in our concrete lives and societies, science is never just a method. Science is always undertaken by a life, the life of the scientist, and life always either goes in the direction of culture and life, or the direction of barbarism and death. And this is why the philosopher of life has the duty to intervene.
This is then how barbarism and science are connected. Scientific method rests on the (temporary) discarding of all living qualities. And in this discarding, barbarism finds a manner in which to explicate itself. Moreover, enamoured by the enormous successes of the sciences in the past centuries, both for the gathering of knowledge, and for the application in both technology and the ordering of our lives by ‘scientific method’, the idea arises in the barbaric soul, that finally the entirety of life can be ordered on the basis of barbarism. Remember, in the emergence of culture, the entirety of life with all its suffering and joys, was interpreted from the sense of union one feels at the peak of joy. And from this sense of union, culture emerges to give expression to this unity of life. And hence, society is ordered on the basis of this union. This ‘thing’, life, is taken as the model for our lives. But, with the emergence of barbarism, the entirety of life with all its joys and suffering, with all that makes it living, is interpreted from this sense of dis-union, this sense of not-wanting-to-undergo life. And from this feeling of disconnection, the desire arises to model our own life and society on the basis of this feeling. With modern techno-science, the barbaric instinct gains the most powerful tool imaginable to finally accomplish its secret goal; to spread its feeling of disunion everywhere, not only in one’s individual life, but throughout society at large. Because techno-science offers the tools to structure society on the basis of a method that knows not of what makes life living, and that is premised on not knowing what makes life living.
Of course, one can create art driven by a life-denying instinct of barbarism. One can create food driven by such a desire, poisoning all who eat it. One can create architecture that depresses. One can do all these things, and one could do these things before the emergence of modern science. But, with modern science, one manner of thinking is given which can enact this destruction, this ‘shutting out of life’, in all areas of human activity. Empowered by the feeling of its own superiority, highly driven by the enormous successes of the sciences which seem to go much faster than advances in other areas, science commands all non-scientific manners of knowing to either be discarded or to be modelled on itself. Hence, various ancient medical practices which have the proof of healing on their side, are discarded and ridiculed because they do not have the proof of science on their side. A remarkable situation in itself; we listen not to the positive or negative effects a certain practice has on the flourishing of our lives. Rather, we listen to whether the practice corresponds to the criteria set by science. Philosophy is forced to become philosophy of science if it still wants to hold a claim to truth. Political philosophy must become political-science. The age-old pursuit to ‘know thyself’ is turned into the ‘science’ of psychology. Ethics becomes the analysis of costs and benefits, and the list goes on.
V. Barbarism is always secondary to culture.
“A life which denies itself, the auto-negation of life, this is the crucial event which determines modern culture understood as scientific culture.”
(La Barbarie, 113)
We said that when life is given over to itself as this process of auto-affection, a surplus of energy is created. This surplus offers two possibilities; to either discharge this energy through culture, or to leave this energy unemployed and flee from it in barbarism. From this scheme, barbarism and culture seem co-originary. This is only seemingly so. Barbarism is always second. Why? The feeling of ourselves feeling is itself the most primal form of desire for itself (culture). Life itself is nothing but this desire to undergo itself, it is the feeling that desires to feel itself. Life itself desires to undergo itself, and it desires nothing else. It are we, as separate egos, that seek to intervene in this desire, and seek to stop it: barbarism. In our essence, we are nothing but life undergoing itself: auto-affection. And in this sense, what we call culture is nothing but the external expression of this essence of ourselves which consists in a continuous auto-expression of ourselves. In truth, life is culture, and culture is life. But somewhere in this process of auto-affection, the illusion is created that I as an individual am separate from this process. As we say, “I undergo life”, but this is an illusion, for I am nothing but this undergoing of life, and this undergoing is me. Regardless, in daily life, so much focussed on what is happening in front of our eyes, on feeling the different objects and experiences that the world presents to us, we often lose sight of the fact that before I experience this or that outside of me, I experience myself feeling myself feeling: the auto-affection of life. We thus think ourselves as beings separate from life, and we live as egos ignorant of our true Self: Life. Because of this, the auto-affection of life that we intimately feel as the various modalities of joy and suffering, is felt as separate from us. Because I think myself different from Life, I can say ‘I hate life’, or ‘I love life.’ As if life was something separate from me that I could position myself towards in a manner of my liking. And because of this illusion of separation, the belief arises in us, that we can separate ourselves from life. Of course, this belief is more likely to emerge when we feel suffering than when we feel joy. In the latter scenario, we do not think of separating ourselves from the joy of living, we desire it and want to become more one with it. But in suffering, the desire to separate ourselves is much stronger, and thus, the belief that we are separate egos is much more likely to emerge.
We can say that the origin of culture, resides in a connection with life. In the feeling that we are one with this eternal process of self-undergoing, with all its joys and sufferings. In this feeling of unity, the desire arises to share in this process of self-undergoing, and we seek to express this process to higher and higher degrees in the various activities of culture. The origin of barbarism however, resides in a disconnection from life. In the feeling that we are separate egos, and that the life that we are condemned to undergo is to blame for all our misery. And so, the desire arises to separate ourselves from life even more. And when the tools present themselves, we seek to destroy all manifestations of culture, that is, of life expressing itself. It is the sign of a strong ‘life’ to, even in the depths of suffering, not lose sight of the magnificent union of Life, and to stay connected with it, even when all the suffering lures one into fleeing from Life. It is the sign of a weak ‘life’, to flee from life at the slightest suffering, and to interpret the most innocent signs of joy from the light of suffering. Nothing is ever good for the life of barbarism, for life itself is condemned from the start. Life-affirming, or nihilism, these are the choices presented to us when faced with the self-undergoing of life.
From this we gather that culture and barbarism are not co-orignary. For life itself, is culture. It is when we feel connected to life, when we recognize our union with it, that we yearn to express this union through culture. In culture, we merely share deeply in the process of Life’s auto-affection. In culture, we express what we are, we become what we are. Barbarism on the other hand, is a bastard instinct, born from the desire to be separated from life, and desiring to undertake those actions that separate one from life even further. Strengthened by scientific method and its promise to model life on the basis of what is not living — abstract mathematical idealities—, barbarism eventually turns against all veritable expressions of culture. It does so by nature, for barbarism’s Idea is to flee from the auto-affection of Life. And when it observes culture, it observes a form of this auto-affection. Modern scientific barbarism commands all forms of culture to either be destroyed, or to model themselves on itself, because it recognizes in them what it secretly seeks to flee from: life.
Barbarism can best be understood as a turning against life, as a reaction. And hence, it turns all the values of life upside down. What is sought is no longer to give the diversity of individual lives a unity in the underlying unity of Life. Rather, what is sought is to have the diversity of individual lives flee from any such unity. It is herein that the specificity of today’s barbarism lies, and what makes it different from the usual process of cultural rise and decay. As we said, a culture is a unity, given to it by the unity of Life. All different cultural expressions (science, religion, art, philosophy, cooking, architecture, labour, etc.) find their union through this highest unity given by life. Today’s barbarism arises from the disgust with this underlying unity: life, and thus tries to dismantle such unity and reacts against culture understood as the expression of the unity of life in auto-affection. How is it able to do so? Through modern scientific ideology. We said that when cultures fall, they fall as a unity. It is a manner of living with many different expressions that falls down at once, and is replaced by a different unity. But with modern barbarism, the destruction is not brought about by a different unity coming to crush a former unity. Rather, it is brought about by an internal dissolution caused by one branch of cultural expression, science, reacting against all other branches by either destroying them or entirely modelling them on itself. This pursuit is not motivated by the desire to bring about a different unity of life, but by the desire to be done with the unity of life in itself. Hence, it is barbarism. Most important, is that this one branch, science, is itself no longer an expression of culture, of the desire to express life. Rather, it is an expression of what is opposed to culture, the desire to suppress life.
When you used to travel, you might have encountered different cultures. And you were annoyed by this different culture and how different it was from your own. Now, you encounter more of the same. Wherever you go, it is the same system of knowing, it are the same sciences of man, it are the same foods. But what is this ‘the same’? It is not the same unity. Rather, it is the same drift against any cultural unity whatsoever. You do encounter the same, but this ‘same’ is not a culture, it is not an expression of life, it is an expression of what is foreign to life. You travel, but you no longer encounter a different manner in which the living express their connection with life. Rather, you travel, and you encounter the same manner in which the living express their disconnect from life. You do not encounter a different manner in which the living seek to express life, you encounter the same manner in which the living seek to flee from life. You encounter the same machines, the same fabricated foods prepared in the same factories, you encounter the same brand of politicians stemming from the same corrupt universities, you encounter the same religion, which is the religion of trans-human infested science, you use your same QR-code to gain access to the same stores, etc. There is more connection, and you could even say that there is more unity. But this is not a connection or a unity given by life, but a connection or a unity offered by what is foreign to life, and undertaken to suppress life. We are all the same, in our desire to flee from life. In the same manner that scientific method abstracts from everything living to discover the same dead mathematical idealities behind everything, our scientific cultures have abstracted from life, in order to see the same dead structures and systems everywhere. In Marc Augé’s “Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité”, he speaks of the increasing dominance of non-places. Traditionally, every place is highly unique because it is rooted in a certain time and place, or in a form of life. In nature, you cannot find the exact same forest or the exact same waterfall in two places on the earth. Because each natural phenomena is a direct expression of its rootedness in a specific environment. And in culture, you cannot find the exact same type of building in two places on the earth. Because every style of architecture is rooted in the lives and manners of expression that live there. From modernity and onwards, this no longer holds, and we are increasingly faced with what Augé calls ‘non-places.’ Examples are airports, metro-stations, McDonalds restaurants, highways, shopping malls, etc. These places are not given their specificity by the specific environment from which they emerge, they could be anywhere, and they are everywhere. The same architecture is seen in every country, no longer rooted in the specific cultural lives of the people who live there. And even nature is increasingly a non-place, you see the same artificially planned parks everywhere, with plants that should not even grow in the place by nature. This is the type of ‘unity’ that we see increasingly, and which is precisely a ‘non-unity’, for it is a false unity. For it is a unity constructed out of the desire to flee from what is the only real unity: life. Barbarism, the desire to be done with life, and the desire to destroy every last expression of life as known through culture. Modern techno-science, the manner in which barbarism is finally able to do so. It is through modern techno-science that the diversity of traditional architectures can be replaced by the false unity of the same unexpressive pods. It is through modern techno-science that the diversity of cultures can be pulled away from their traditional ways of eating, and be served the same factory-made slop. It is through modern techno-science that the diversity of cultures lose their own specific artistic expressions, and that we can all watch the same Netflix show. The list goes on.
We must remind ourselves, barbarism is as old as life itself. At every point of suffering, the desire can take root to flee from life. But it is only with the dominance of modern techno-science, that barbarism finds the tools to finally actualize its desire. A desire, which Henry designates as Evil:
“There is no barbarism without the irruption of Evil, that insane yet fully intelligible will of self-destruction.”
(La Barbarie, 242)
This is Evil: the desire to flee from one’s essence which resides in Life. And history has brought it to be, that techno-science has become the tool of choice for this instinct of Evil to unfold itself. It flees from life, and calls progress every new invention that allows us to distance ourselves from ourselves. Science is evidently not Evil, but in the contemporary manifestation of science as techno-science, we discern everywhere the underlying instinct of Evil as a fleeing from life. Pills that merely suppress symptoms but heal no one, are said to be medical advances. And what is the suppression of a symptom, but the silencing of Life speaking to us, through the feeling of ourselves feeling pain? Awards are given to STEM-students who can make the next insignificant app for children to prostitute themselves. We give praise for those, who can come up with the most effective tool to flee from ourselves in the meta-verse. And it is called social progress when apps are mandated that track biometric data. Social progress, when we replace our real identities as living, feeling, and thinking beings, with numbers on a government-issued passport. It is called emancipation, when pharmaceutical companies can line their pockets by helping insecure children flee their Nature-given bodies. It is called artistic progress, when art no longer expresses Ideas of the eternal, but only fleeting media-induced opinions about the worries of today. Progress is measured, not by the degree to which we express life, but by the degree to which we flee from life.
Evil always sells itself as Good, and it does so, by inverting values. What flees from Life, is what is good. What accepts Life, is what is evil. This is barbarism, and in our day and age, it enacts its deception through the means of techno-science.
Descartes, another father of modern science, lamented how in the Jesuit schools he went to, people were so obsessed with constructing all sorts of insignificant technological machines. He found it boring and destructive, and complained that science was used for these ends. What he wanted, was for science to be more applied. But, what does he mean with applied? Isn’t using science to build technologies what it means to do applied-science? What Descartes means, is that technology should always be in the service of life. We should build a machine, when it can help us as living beings make better decisions. We should build machines, when they can help nature run its natural course. When I have a pain in my knee, and I can’t figure out what is causing it, it might be helpful to have a machine that can make a scan of my knee. But only so that afterwards, now knowing where the cause is located, I can undertake actions to remedy the pain, and to solve the root-cause. I can do certain exercises that target the painful area, eat a certain way to lower inflammation, or cease doing activities that over-stress the painful area. This is how science is a tool that furthers the interests of life, used to make ourselves grow and flourish. We have evidently not listened to Descartes, for we increasingly live in a world where technologies are not advanced because they bring life to greater flourishing, but because they suppress life. Why? Because what is making the decisions, is not life yearning to live, but life seeking to flee itself.
VI. No turning back?
We started our investigation with Michel Henry’s fear that, perhaps, there is no turning back. And that because of this, perhaps, there is no striving forward. With the means of techno-science, barbarism has become so pervasive, the instinct has filled so many hearts, that it is not so sure if it is possible to turn things around. The desire to flee life, is not something that happens, at isolated times when we feel most low. It is not something that happens, in the fringes of society. No, barbarism determines all of our actions; the ideology of barbaric techno-science is taught in schools, the universities preach a hatred for Life, and every night we flee from our wretched existence in the metaverse. Barbarism has become the norm. We read Henry:
“What becomes of culture in such a condition? Culture subsists in the same manner as the untiring coming into itself of life, as its word which is never entirely silent. But she goes into a sort of incognito. The exchange to which she holds claim no longer takes place in the light of the City, through its monuments, its painting, its music, its education —its media. Like its expressions, culture too goes underground: it are brief exchanges of words, individuals communicating to each other when, by chance of meeting, they recognize in each other the same sign of life. To transmit culture, to allow each one to become what he is, to escape the unbearable anguish of the techno-media universe, its drugs, its monstrous growth, its anonymous transcendence. They would like to transmit culture, but the world has forced them into silence once and for all. Can the world still be saved by a few?”
(La Barbarie, 247)
When barbarism becomes the norm, culture must necessarily exist underground. But it exists, nonetheless, only this time away from the light of the city. For it cannot not exist, for culture is nothing but the expression of our essence; life expressing itself. However barbarism might take over our hearts and minds, the roots of culture always insist underneath. For barbarism is always secondary to culture, and barbarism can only exist by grace of life. Barbarism is a life that turns against itself, but it is still a life.
“A way of life which turns against life, that is, against itself, this is a contradiction.” (La Barbarie, 115).
Barbarism is this contradiction. It is nothing but a lie, living to the end the false belief that life can separate itself from itself. Whereas in truth, there is no distance in life. In the intimate knowledge of our feeling ourselves feeling, we know life, because we ourselves are life. A self-knowledge in which there is not the slightest possibility of distancing ourselves from ourselves, not the slightest transcendence, but only a radical immanence of which no word can speak, of which no science can speak.
Much has happened since La Barbarie was first published in 1987. And only a fool could claim that things have not gotten worse. The marxist push to remove theology from universities is reaching unseen levels. The scientist cult’s breakdown on natural healing is as violent as ever. And as the corona story showed all too well, most prefer listening to media-experts, than to their own lives. A ‘peer-reviewed study’ is trusted more, than the sight of one’s true peers dropping dead.
Around the time of La Barbarie being published, Michel Henry appeared on roundtable talks on French television alongside other thinkers, speaking passionately about the unseen cultural decay. In our time, these sort of ‘dissident’ voices are no longer even allowed on television. And as I write this text, another wave of accounts being banned from Twitter is taking place. All those who speak of culture, who speak of life, are pushed underground by the grip of barbarism. And if we must listen to Henry, this is no odd occurence, but a natural part of barbarism’s modus operandi. Today’s barbarism, driven by techno-science, finds its root in the disgraceful attack on life, and thus also on culture. As the instinct to flee from life, this is what barbarism does by essence. And as long as barbarism is permitted to live its paradoxical existence, it will continue to do so. But as a paradox, it cannot remain forever. This is what Henry’s phenomenology of Life teaches us, and what every great philosophy of Life teaches, from the Vedas, to Atenism, through Platonism, the mystics of all traditions, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and among many others, Michel Henry. That however much lies and Evil might come into existence, it will never insist. For what insists is Life, and Life is truth, and Life is Good. And it is from and in life that every lie comes to be, that all barbarism comes to be. This barbarism is merely the desire, born from Life itself, to stretch outwards, to pursue what is different from itself to the most paradoxical end. But it can only do so, because it itself is Life in its deepest essence. And it is because it is this essence, that it can have the power to fight this essence. This is what barbarism is, and what corresponds to how Evil is defined in all great philosophies of Life:
“the conflict which unfolds between a way of life and its essence, between a subjective modality and the fabric out of which it is made.”
(La Barbarie, 117)
It is in this, and in nothing else, that the religious aspect of Michel Henry’s phenomenology resides, and why every great philosophy must be coloured by religio. For it is from the knowledge of our deepest essence as Life, that the belief is born, that however much suffering comes to pass, and however much barbarism comes to be, Life necessarily insists underneath. And as we ourselves are nothing but this Life experiencing itself, Evil can never remain. We can turn away from the Sun, we can hate its rays for burning us, but this hatred and turning away, is only made possible because the Sun has given us life. In the same manner, we can turn away from Life itself, through all the trans-human projects of death, but we can only do so, because Life has given us the possibility to do so.
As Heidegger ceaselessly reminds us, thinking is essentially a thanking. In thinking about something, I direct my attention towards this thing. In thinking, I devote myself to this thing, and thank it for its presence.
And what is more worthy of thought, of thanks, of devotion, than that which is the source of all possible thinking, and most of all of our own essence? What is more worthy of devotion, than Life? This is why all philosophy of Life is coloured by devotion, and turns into a cultus of Life sooner or later. For contrary to contemporary belief, philosophy is not the search for disinterested knowledge. For all knowledge is essentially interested. In thinking about something, I direct my attention towards this thing. In seeking knowledge about something, I express my interest in this thing. Thinking is always a directing of ourselves, and why should we direct ourselves to things that drag us lower, instead of to things that raise us higher? Why should we direct ourselves to what is opposed to life, to what diminishes life, and not to what gives us life? Everyone thinks, but the philosopher takes the time to consider the direction which thought should take. Culture, or barbarism?
We see clearly, that we have been going in the wrong direction. But as contrary is known by contrary, the greatest Evil will eventually make clearer what is truly worthy of worship. For some, reflection is enough to make this clear, but for most, the suffering of life at the peak of misery must first be fully lived through, before joy is to be found on the other end.
VII. Conclusion: Life and Culture
We can end our discussion by positing a parallelism in Henry, between the history of society-culture at large, and the proper history of every individual life. The latter, as we saw, consists in the endless undergoing of the modalities of feeling; from joy to suffering, and through suffering once again towards joy. And in this joy, the redeeming of all past suffering. The history of society-culture at large, is much the same. As man is a living being, before he is a knowing being, he has to first feel the consequences of his evil actions, before he can realize that they must be overcome. The barbarism we face is much the same, and as culture is increasingly driven underground, the only question worth asking is, how much longer? How much further must we depart from life, before we realize, we have been going in the wrong direction? How much further must we flee, before we realize, that we cannot flee from ourselves?
Sources:
Michel Henry, La Barbarie. Paris: PUF, 1987.
J.F. Mattéi. La barbarie intérieure: Essai sur l’immonde moderne. Paris: PUF, 2004.
Marc Augé. Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: SEUIL, 1992.
Galileo Galilei. The Assayer (abridged). Translated by Stillman Drake.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington: Regnery Pubslihing, 1962.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990.