Resumo de On The Problems Of Society

On the Problems of Society

Michel Henry wrote
an important work on Marx, whom he considers, paradoxically, as one

of the first Christian
thinkers and as one of the most important western philosophers because
of the weight he gives in his thought to living work and to the living
individual in whom he sees the foundation of economic
reality. The fact that the real thought of Marx has been so poorly

understood and so badly interpreted is due to complete ignorance of
his
fundamental philosophical writings in the constitution of the official
doctrine
of Marxism
due to their very late publication. For example, The German Ideology
appeared only in 1932.In
his essay on Barbarity, Michel Henry questions himself on science,
which
is founded on the idea of an universal and thus objective truth and
which
therefore leads to the elimination of sensible qualities of the world,
of
sensibility and of life. The science is not bad by itself as long as it
restricts
to study nature, but it tends to exclude all others traditional
cultures namely art, ethic and religion. Science delivered to itself
leads to the
technique whose blind processes develop by themselves in a monstrous
way
without reference to life.Science is a way of culture in which life
denies
itself and refuses itself any value, it is a practical negation of
life, which

goes on in a theoretical negation in the way of all the ideologies
which bring
back all possible knowledge to that of science, namely human sciences
whose
objectivity itself deprive them of their object : what is the value of
statistics about suicide, what do they say about the despair it
proceeds
from ? These ideologies have invaded the university and throw it to its
destruction by the elimination of life from its searches and from its
teaching.
Television is the truth of technique, it is the practice par excellence
of the
barbarity, it reduces all event to current events, to incoherent and
insignificant facts.This negation of life results according to Michel
Henry
from the "disease of life", from its secret dissatisfaction of
oneself which leads it to deny itself, to run away from itself in order
to
escape its anguish and its own suffering. In the modern world, we are
almost
all condemned from our childhood to run away our anguish and our own
life in
the mediocrity of the media universe, an escape of oneself and a
dissatisfaction which lead to violence, instead of resorting to the
traditional
and more elaborated forms of culture which allowed the surpassing of
this
suffering and its transformation into joy. Culture subsists only
clandestinely
and in a kind of incognito in our materialist society which is sinking
into
barbarity.Communism and Capitalism are for Michel Henry the two faces
of a same
death, which consists in a same negation of the life. The Marxism
eliminates
the individual life to the benefit of universal abstractions like
society people history or social classes. The Marxism is a way of
fascism, that?s to
say a doctrine which originates in the degradation of the individual
whose
elimination is considered as legitimate. While Capitalism substitutes
economic
entities such as money, profit or interest to the real needs of life.
Capitalism recognizes however the life as source of value, the salary
being the
objective representation of the real subjective and living work. But
Capitalism
gives up progressively the place to the exclusion of the subjectivity
by the
modern technique, which replaces the living work by automated technical
processes, eliminating at the same time the power of creating value and
then
the value itself : the possessions are produced in abundance, but the
unemployment increases and money constantly lakes to buy them. These
themes are

developed in his book From Communism to Capitalism, Theory of a Catastrophe.The
next book he began to write was entitled The Book of the Dead and wass
dealing with what he called the clandestine
subjectivity.
A theme which evokes the condition of the life in the modern world and which is
also probably an allusion to his commitment to the Resistance movement and personal experience of
clandestineness.

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