Barbarism

Michel Henry, Scott Davidson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441132086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Barbarism represents a
critique, from the perspective of Michel Henry's unique philosophy of life, of
the increasing potential of science and technology to destroy the roots of
culture and the value of the individual human being. For Henry, barbarism
is the result of a devaluation of human life and culture that can be
traced back to the spread of quantification, the scientific method and
technology over all aspects of modern life. The book develops a compelling
critique of capitalism, technology and education and provides a powerful
insight into the political implications of Henry's work. It also opens up a new
dialogue with other influential cultural critics, such as Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger.
First published in French in 1987, Barbarism
aroused great interest as well as virulent criticism. Today the book
reveals what for Henry is a cruel reality: the tragic feeling of powerlessness
experienced by the cultured person. Above all he argues for the importance
of returning to philosophy in order to analyse the root causes of
barbarism in our world.

1 CULTURE AND BARBARISM

Barbarism is not a beginning. It is always second to a state of culture that necessarily precedes it, and it is only in relation to this prior culture that it can appear as an impoverishment and a degeneration. Barbarism, as Joseph de Maistre says, is a ruin, not a rudiment. Culture is thus always first. Even the coarsest forms of activity and social organization, those attributed to primitive groups, for example, are already modes of culture. They have an organization, with implicit laws and types of behavior that all serve to make the existence of the group and its survival possible. Even when these elementary forms seem to be fixed and their blind transmission merely results in the renewal of continually repeated structures, profound forces are at work in order to maintain not only the current state of affairs but also the continuation of life. It could be said that they stand on the lookout. They are not content just to preserve what is the case, instead they wait, with a patience lasting for centuries, for the opportunity to have an impact on these acquisitions and to achieve a new leap, to discover still unperceived relations, to invent a tool or an idea, and to give rise to a new world.

What then is culture? Every culture is a culture of life, in the dual sense whereby life is both the subject and the object of this culture. It is an action that life exerts on itself and through which it transforms itself insofar as life is both transforming and transformed. “Culture” means nothing other than that. “Culture” refers to the self-transformation of life, the movement by which it continually changes itself in order to arrive at higher forms of realization and completeness, in order to grow. But if life is this incessant movement of self-transformation and self-fulfillment, it is culture itself. Or at least it carries it as something inscribed in it and sought by it.

What life are we speaking about here? What is this force that is continually maintained and grows? It is not in any way the life that forms the theme of biology and the object of a science. It is not the molecules and particles that the scientist tries to reach through microscopes and whose natures are developed through multiple procedures in order to construct laboriously a concept of them that is more adequate but still subject to revision. The life studied by biologists is thus one that will never be known completely, except in a way that is ideal and as such never attained by scientific progress. Even if we still only have an imperfect notion of biological life today, it should be noted that humanity has survived for millennia without having the least idea of it and without suspecting its existence – without the changes of human life, its maintenance, its growth and its culture, owing anything to it. We can thus already anticipate a first truth which it is useful to reflect on at the end of the twentieth century, namely, that culture originally and in itself has nothing to do with science and does not result from it in any way.

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 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.

Now if we want to say that this extraordinary property of experiencing oneself is knowledge and indeed the deepest form of knowledge, and thus that life, as alive, is this original knowing, as is also said with respect to the knowledge of science, it is important to clarify what sort of knowledge is in question in these two cases and how they are distinguished from one another. Otherwise, the debate over culture and barbarism – which are held together in an essential relation (positively or negatively) to knowledge in general –will become lost in confusion.

Scientific knowledge is objective. But, two things are meant and usually confused by this. First, “objective” can mean that scientific knowledge is rational, universally valid and as such recognizable by everyone. It is true knowledge in contrast with the changing opinions of individuals, particular points of view and everything that is only “subjective.” This claim to overcome the particularity and relativity of the “subjective” must be grasped in its full significance. Far beyond a mere rejection of individual differences, it goes back to the deep nature of experience and the human condition and can only be understood on that basis. It played a key role in Galileo’s time in the birth of modern science, that is, the mathematical science of nature.

The world is given to us in sensible, variable, and contingent appearances that form only a Heraclitean flux – a river in which one can never bathe twice – in which nothing remains and there is no fixed point for solid knowledge. According to this Galilean science of nature that came to revolutionize the European way of thinking and that shaped it into being what it is, it remains possible to go beyond the relativity of subjective appearances and to display a true being of the world, a world in itself. The knowledge of this world is possible, if one abstracts the sensible qualities and, in a general way, everything that is derived from subjectivity, and if one only retains, as truly existing, the abstract forms of the spatiotemporal world. These forms lend themselves to a geometrical determination that is the same for every mind. In place of individual impressions and the changing opinions they give rise to, a univocal knowledge of the world, of what truly exists, is offered.

The sphere of subjectivity – sensations, opinions, personal thoughts, etc.; in short, everything that can be called the world of the mind or human spirituality – is based on this nature whose true being is proven and ultimately explained by science. The “sciences of the mind” or, as they are called today, the “human sciences” thus do not have any autonomy. They are not symmetrical with the natural sciences. Their studies seem provisional, sooner or later to give way to another type of knowledge, one that will abandon mental reality, that is, the level of human experience, and be directed toward its hidden bases: the world of molecules and atoms. If this domain of human spirituality were the object of culture, it would be with good reason that it would continue to regress to the benefit of more appropriate disciplines. Those might be called the foundational sciences.

One cannot pass over in silence the extraordinary reversal carried out by Husserlian phenomenology of the well-known theses that support the scientific and positivist ideology of our times.¹ The geometrical determinations to which Galilean science seeks to reduce the being of things are themselves idealities. Instead of being able to explain the sensible, subjective, and relative world in which our everyday activity takes place, they necessarily refer to this lifeworld. It is only in relation to it that they have a sense. They are constructed on the inescapable ground of this world. From this point of view, the Earth is not a planet that turns around the sun in the theoretical constructions of science but the ground of every experience to which scientific idealizations inevitably refer. Here one must reiterate the outrageous verdict of Husserl and agree with him that “the arch-originary Earth does not move.”²

Moreover, the geometrical and mathematic determinations used in the sciences are idealities and thus presuppose the subjective operation that produces them and without which they would not exist. Number, calculation, addition, subtraction, straight, and curve do not exist in nature. They are ideal meanings whose absolute origin is found in the consciousness that creates them in the strict sense of the word and that should be called a transcendental consciousness with regard to them. If geometrical and mathematical idealizations come from subjectivity, this does not reduce them to being mere appearances. Instead, here the world of science finds the principle that continually engenders it and that remains its permanent condition of possibility.

To the extent that the world of the mind, with its own laws and creations, seems to depend on nature – on a human or animal body – this nature is precisely not the world of science with its abstract idealities. It is the lifeworld – a world which can only be accessed within a sensibility like ours and which is only given to us through the endless play of its constantly changing and renewed subjective appearances. Galileo’s illusion, like all those who came after him and considered science to be absolute knowledge, was to have taken the mathematical and geometrical world, which provided univocal knowledge of the real world, for this real world itself, is the world that we can intuit and experience only in the concrete modes of our subjective life.

This subjective life does not just create the idealities and abstractions of science, as with all conceptual thought in general. It gives form to this lifeworld in the midst of which our concrete existence unfolds. Something as simple as a cube or a house is not just a thing that exists outside of us and without us, as if it were on its own as the substrate of its qualities. It only becomes what it is due to a complex activity of perception that goes beyond the succession of sensible givens that we have of it and posits the cube or the house as an ideal pole of identity to which all these subjective appearances refer. Each perception of a side of a cube or a façade of the house refers to the potential perceptions of other sides that have not yet been perceived, following an indefinite play of relations. The same holds for every object in general and for every transcendent formation. Each time, their existence implies a synthetic operation of transcendental subjectivity.

To be sure, in our daily life we do not pay attention to this consciousness that constitutes the world of our usual environment. We perceive the house and are inattentive to our perception of the house. We are conscious of the world but never conscious of our consciousness of the world. It is the task of philosophy to give proof of this tireless activity of the consciousness that perceives the world, conceives the idealities and abstractions of science, imagines, remembers, etc. It thereby produces all of the irreal representations that continually accompany us in the course of real life.

It is true that some scholars have called into question the very existence of this consciousness that classical philosophy placed at the heart of science and of all knowledge in general, first and foremost the sensed knowledge of the world around us. The founders of behaviorism demanded to be “shown” this supposed consciousness in the same way as the other sciences are able to show, in their test tubes or microscopes, the objects of consciousness about which they spoke.³ They do not realize that consciousness really is this power of “showing” to which they themselves, the other sciences, and every other form of knowledge constantly appeal.

If one were to ask about this consciousness whose transcendental operations constitute the objects of the world of perception before creating the idealities of the scientific world, one must first observe that the power in question is the same in both cases, in the most simple and immediate perception as in the most developed scientific regard: it is the power of showing, of making visible, of putting something into the condition of presence. This making visible is itself a putting-in-front (faire-venir-devant) in the condition of the object, such that the visibility in which each thing becomes visible is nothing other than objectivity as such. Objectivity is the foreground of light in which everything that shows itself to us is shown – whether it is a sensible reality or a scientific ideality. Consciousness is traditionally understood as the “subject,” but the subject is the condition of the object, which means that things become objects for us and thereby show themselves to us so that we can know them.

This implicit conception of consciousness –that is, of the phenomenality of phenomena – is in the background of most philosophies as well as science itself. Kant, for example, attempts to demonstrate the possibility of experience, and it seems that this possibility belongs to objects, that is, to the set of conditions (the intuitions of space and time and the categories of the understanding) through which objects can be given to us and consequently through which we are able to relate to them and experience them. In Husserlian phenomenology, this possibility of relating to objects, of going out toward them in order to reach them, is intentionality. Intentionality defines the basis of consciousness itself, its power of showing and displaying, or in other words, phenomenality itself. It is quite remarkable that the same presuppositions are secretly at work in the philosophies that have claimed to reject the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity (or, in the case of ancient thought, those that did not even use these concepts). To know is always to see; to see is to see what is seen; what is seen is what stands there in front of us, what is put before us; it is the object. It exists to the extent that it is placed out in front, that it is object, that it is seen and known. Consciousness is this putting-forward as such, and knowledge is objectivity. The setting aside of the concepts of “subjectivity” and “consciousness” by post-Husserlian, Heideggerian, and post-Heideggerian phenomenology is really the rejection of everything that cannot be reduced to this primitive opening of the Outside in which the Object stands.

We have said that the distinctive feature of scientific knowledge is its objectivity. By that, we mean its supra-subjective and supra-individual character, its universality. What is true scientifically is such that it can be recognized by every mind (provided that it has the requisite competence). But the objectivity of scientific knowledge in its universality depends on the ontological objectivity that was just in question, in other words, on the fact that what is true must be able to be demonstrated. It ultimately must be able to be shown and brought into the condition of being there in front. It is in this condition of the object that every regard will be able to discover and see it in order to be assured of what it sees. Scientific knowledge is thus homogenous with the knowledge of consciousness in general and simply extends it, because it too obeys the telos of evidence. That is to say that they share the same effort to bring into full light before the regard that which will be clearly perceived in this light, and in this way, will be indubitable.⁴

The problem of culture – like the correlative problem of barbarism – can only become philosophically intelligible if it is deliberately referred to a dimension of being where the knowledge of consciousness and of science (which is a developed form of consciousness) no longer intervene, and if it is placed into relation with life and with life alone. That is the first implication of the claim that culture is the culture of life. It does not just signify that culture is the self-transformation of life. This self-transformation alone could only be blind. Inasmuch as it seeks growth, it must rely on a type of knowledge: culture thus relies on another type of knowledge than that of science and consciousness. This is the knowledge of life, and as we have indicated, life constitutes this knowledge by its own essence. It is the very fact of experiencing oneself in each point of one’s being and thus this auto-revelation with which life begins and ends. What exactly does this original knowledge of life that is the basis of culture consist of? How does it differ from the knowledge of consciousness and science, to the point of excluding them irreparably from itself?

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 from her effort, 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 reading of the book uses a knowledge of consciousness; it consists partly in the perception of words, that is to say, in the sensible intuition of marks written on paper, and partly in the intellectual grasp of the ideal meanings that the words carry. Together, these meanings form the sense of the book, that is, the scientific knowledge contained in it. The knowledge that made possible the 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.

If one were to ask which of these three types of knowledge is fundamental, it would be necessary to reject the prejudices of our time all at once: the beliefs that scientific knowledge is not only the most important but in reality the only true knowledge; that knowledge means science, that is, the type of mathematical knowledge of nature introduced at the time of Galileo; that everything prior to this arrival of rigorous science in the West was only a mass of disordered knowledge and confused feelings, if not prejudices and illusions. One should not forget, however, that beginnings are always what is the most difficult. How was prescientific humanity, lacking all of the tools that modern technology would later provide, able to survive and develop? Moreover, how was it ever able to produce extraordinary results in many domains, for example those of art and religion, that people of our time would be unable to achieve, unl...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s introduction
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction: what was never seen
• 1 Culture and barbarism
• 2 Science judged by the criterion of art
• 3 Science alone: technology
• 4 The sickness of life
• 5 The ideologies of barbarism
• 6 The practices of barbarism
• 7 The destruction of the university
• Conclusion: underground
• Index