[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

Experience cannot be conceived as an effect; a reality cannot happen other than to theextent that it provides a sense and a consciousness. Scientific idealities always refer, therefore,to a sense-giving consciousness. This sense can exist in itself in axiomatic systems,yet to possess a value of knowledge in the so-called real world it has to go through theworld-of-life, the sensitive world. In other words, as idealities, the geometric and mathematicaldeterminations imply subjective operation, a transcendental consciousness, a principlewhich, as it continually engenders the world of science, is a permanent condition forits own possibility: “The transcendental condition of the possibility of the experience ingeneral is the condition of science itself.” 30 Continuing on the basis of a technologicalhyper-development, scientific knowledge invaded the entire field of the logos, of praxis 31and culture with an exclusive claim on truth, and its effects on the notions of the world,subjectivity and life often went unnoticed or were not thought through: “To the extent towhich culture is the culture of life and pertains to it exclusively, the science that keepsthis life and its specific development out of its subject matter, which is culture itself, remainswell and truly alien to it. The relationship between science and culture is a relationshipof mutual exclusion. … By eliminating … the world-of-life and life itself, science placesitself paradoxically outside the latter and its development, and consequently outside allpossible culture.” 32 Culture has originally, in itself, nothing to do with science and doesnot ensue from it. Life, in turn, is not to be taken as the object of scientific knowledge:“The relation to the object is the vision of the object, whether it is the sensory vision ofthe sensory object or the intellectual vision of an intelligible object. … Now, the knowledgecontained in the vision of the object is not in the least exhausted in the knowledge of theobject. It means the knowledge of the vision itself, which is no longer consciousness, theintentional relation to the object, but life.” 33 But if objective sciences have understoodnothing about life, 34 human sciences, for their part, have reduced man to an automaton. 35An example of this is the temptation of modern neurosciences and cognitive sciences toreduce thought and ideas to the objective body in which the possibility of excess of thequestion of sense is always presented as an illusion. Philosophy does not escape thiseither, as in the form of a classic transcendental phenomenology it does not know anymanifestation other than that produced within the world 36 : “When subjectivity is nothing30Ibid., 104.31Michel Henry defines praxis in the following way: “Le savoir de la vie comme savoir où la vieconstitue à la fois le pouvoir qui connaît et ce qui est connu par lui procurant, de façon exclusive, son«contenu», je l’appelle praxis. … En tant que la culture est la culture de la vie et repose sur le savoirpropre de celle-ci, elle est essentiellement pratique.” Ibid., 37-38.32Ibid., 102-103.33Ibid., 27.34“L’illusion de Galilée comme de tous ceux qui, à sa suite, considèrent la science comme un savoirabsolu, ce fut justement d’avoir pris le monde géométrique, destiné a fournir une connaissance univoquedu monde réel, pour ce monde réel lui-même, ce monde que nous ne pouvons qu’intuitionner et éprouverdans les modes concrets de notre vie subjective.” Ibid., 19.35“Les ‘sciences de l’esprit’, ou, comme on dit aujourd’hui, les ‘sciences humaines’ n’ont doncaucune autonomie, elles ne constituent pas le symétrique des sciences de la nature, leurs recherches apparaissentprovisoires, vouées tôt ou tard à céder la place à un autre savoir, celui qui, délaissant la réalitépsychique, c’est-à-dire le niveau de l’expérience humaine, s’oriente vers ses soubassements cachés, soitl’univers des molécules et des atomes.” Ibid., 17.36The clearing (Lichtung) where human existence is truly human (ex-sistence), while belonging tothe world, is entirely dominated by the “dimensional ek-static” (dimensional ekstatique) which defines the“phenomenality of the world as such.” Michel Henry, La Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Paris: Puf,2003), 6. The idea of “world” as the fundamental place of all appearance (the conception of the light ofthe world as a transcendental condition for all manifestation) constituted for Michel Henry the greatestobstacle to a true understanding of Christianity and revelation.157