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4. THE SUBJECTIVE BODY AND THE IDEA OF HEALTH IN MICHEL HENRY’SPHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFEStella de AzevedoEntlebnis Versus ErlebnisReflecting at length 1 on the disastrous consequences of Galilean science for theunderstanding of life, Michel Henry departs from the “Krisis” to characterize the Galileanlegacy as a “proto-founding act” 2 of modern science and knowledge which excluded phenomenologicallife by reducing it to the geometrical mathematization of the materialuniverse. 3 The rupture between the knowledge (sagesse) inherited from the Greeks andChristianity, which survived until the eighteenth century, and the aestheticism of modernculture reflected on the opposition between two matrices: that of moral, religious andpolitical unity of the simultaneously sentient and rational being, conceived in the imageof God yet irreducible to all purely conceptual and demonstrable knowledge; 4 and thescientific-technical matrix of the vision of the world, nature and man. In the latter, themodern concept of cogito reflected two major structural epistemological streams ofModernity: the valuing of the ego, the transcendental and timeless subject, with decisiveconsequences both for the devaluing of the concrete man (man builds his identity bytranscending himself through reflection) and for the condition of “incommunicability” ofthe subject; and the discovery of the body-machine that functions autonomously withoutthe contribution of thought. Marked by the rule of appearance and sensuality, the body ofModernity is governed by duality and separation, adopting some ambiguous attitudestowards the body: valuing it on the one hand yet devaluing it on the other. Modernity hasthus radicalized the idea that man is fundamentally a dualistic being, a radicalization thatwas accompanied by the antagonism between subject and object, nature and society,individual freedom and social/communal laws or norms. The rupture or transformation ofthe unity of discourse, such as Modernity conceived it, culminated in the workings of thelinguistic rules that embodied, in the Kantian system, the transcendental structures ofunderstanding. The whole of post-Cartesian philosophy reflects, therefore, the parallelismbetween rationality and the systematic foundation of knowledge, resulting from an ontologyof transcendental subjectivity and a notion of an all-enveloping human essence of apractical-ethical order. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to GeorgSimmel’s analysis, reflected an arduous search for the lost unity of the “transcendence oflife,” the recovery “on a higher basis of the lost unity between nature and spirit, betweenmechanism and inner meaning, between scientific objectivity and the meaning of valuethat we sense in life and things.” 5 Johann Goethe’s life and works strongly expressed anevolution in the concept of the individual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,since they contained various approaches to individuality (articulated in the idea thatman should live from within himself, act from within), to freedom, to equality, in the1Michel Henry, La Barbarie (Paris: Grasset, 1987); idem, C’est moi la Vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1996).2Henry, La Barbarie, 105, 117.3“Galilée accomplit ce que j’appelle en tant que phénoménologue l’acte archi-fondateur de lascience moderne (…) Galilée a estimé qu’il faut connaître l’univers dans lequel nous vivons, car de cetteconnaissance procède l’éthique, notre devoir-être et notre devoir-faire. Mais cette connaissance a pour conditionessentielle le rejet de toutes les formes de connaissance, en particulier celles issues des qualités sensibles.”Michel Henry, Auto-donation (Paris: Prétentaine, 2002), 131.4Pierre Fruchon, L’herméneutique de Gadamer (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 17-18.5Georg Simmel, Kant e Goethe (Buenos Aires: Nova, 1949), 264.152