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Michel Henry, the French philosopher who studies the material phenomenology of life, says no, life is precisely what science DOESN'T know.
Henry notes that, in order to study nature, Galileo, and later Descartes, decided to bracket out all subjective phenomena - colors, feelings - anything he supposed appeared only in the mind.
This method, however, turned into an ontology, where only “objective” things, like physical measurements, abstracted from our actually experience of them, became “real” things, or at least they were privileged, whereas everything appearing in the mind, and even consciousness itself, became an effect of these physical processes, and epiphenomenon.
Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.
Henry departs from Descartes’ substantive mind.
“Life is not something, but rather a knowing.”
For Henry, life is a form of knowledge. What does life know? It knows joy and suffering.
This form of knowledge is non-spatial, non-representable, but it permeates all that is undertaken.
Perceiving colors, handling an instrument, caressing a body, are all experiences whose phenomenal manifestation is a modulation of the two fundamental tonalities of life: joy and suffering. That is why all life is tinted:
“the blue of the sky, the green of trees, the serene or threatening character of a landscape, the sweetness of scents, the beauty of shapes of old cities or the dread in the monstrous suburbs of our time.”
From a normative perspective, Henry claims that the knowledge of life is the primordial knowledge. The evolution of modern scientific knowledge has inverted the orders of knowledge, until it reached a point where it tries to derive the lived experience from an objective third person perspective, of which the hard problem of consciousness is the ultimate expression: how can a phenomenal subject even exist if we start from the natural physical world as conceived by the mind?
In his short essay, What Science Doesn’t Know, found HERE, Henry writes :
“By dismissing the sensible qualities of the world, Galilean science actually abolishes this absolute phenomenological life (the immediate experiencing of oneself present in every fear, in every pleasure, in every sensation, etc.) from its research. And here one
clearly sees that two paths open up before the human mind and that, choosing one or the other is one’s destiny: one must decide between life and death.
Regarding appearances as illusion is the supreme illusion. For every appearance is proof of itself by the very fact that it appears:
appearance is, in its appearing, the basis of every assertion and of every possible truth.
Thus in his last great work Husserl demonstrated that all the idealities and conceptualizations of science must refer to this sensible world that they are supposed to explain, they are erected on the previously given ground of the sensible world, assume it and only have meaning in relation to it.
What is more, these idealities and conceptualizations do not exist in nature: for example, neither circles nor squares are found in nature; instead there are only curves and sensible outlines from which the geometric shapes evolve through a process of ideation.
However this process is an act of consciousness, of that very subjectivity that has been presumed to be illusory and without which science and all its conceptual edifices would not exist.
Further, by creating from the sensible givens of the world the intelligible base that must be accounted for, science develops entirely inside of this experience of the world whose fundamental structures—space, time, causality, etc.—it presupposes.
More radically it assumes that the world itself, i.e. this space of light spread before our gaze, this horizon of visibility inside of which all that we are able to see—whether with our eyes of flesh or with those of the mind—appears.
In other words, scientific experience develops in the prolongation of perceptual experience, as it perceives only objects. Being an object means to be placed before, to become visible, to appear to an eventual gaze, in such a way that it is the fact of being placed before, it is the objectivity of the object, the exteriority of the world that creates visibility, the phenomenality of all that is found placed in this condition of being an object.
What then is an experience in which there is neither an object nor a world, and the content of which has escaped both the perceptual gaze as well as the gaze of science?
Such however is the essence of life, the phenomenological life that experiences and realizes itself interiorly without ever hollowing out, between it and itself, the distancing of a world (l’écart d’un monde), the place of any object. Life that can neither be seen nor understood in the sense of science, certainly, but which is no less unquestionable or incontestable, and which on the order of a fear, desire or sensation is found to be necessary, in that we experience it, and as we experience it.
This then is what science does not know: our life. This life is not something (as is the case for biological life for example) but rather a knowing, the first and most essential knowing of all, the one that presupposes all the others. For every knowledge by which we
know the world (whether it is a question of the sensible world or of the world of geometrico-mathematical idealities)—seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding—would not be if they weren’t first living, if they didn’t experience themselves interiorly and thus know themselves with a nonobjective and irrepresentable knowledge in the very act by which they see, hear, understand, etc.”
…
Henry notes that, in order to study nature, Galileo, and later Descartes, decided to bracket out all subjective phenomena - colors, feelings - anything he supposed appeared only in the mind.
This method, however, turned into an ontology, where only “objective” things, like physical measurements, abstracted from our actually experience of them, became “real” things, or at least they were privileged, whereas everything appearing in the mind, and even consciousness itself, became an effect of these physical processes, and epiphenomenon.
Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.
Henry departs from Descartes’ substantive mind.
“Life is not something, but rather a knowing.”
For Henry, life is a form of knowledge. What does life know? It knows joy and suffering.
This form of knowledge is non-spatial, non-representable, but it permeates all that is undertaken.
Perceiving colors, handling an instrument, caressing a body, are all experiences whose phenomenal manifestation is a modulation of the two fundamental tonalities of life: joy and suffering. That is why all life is tinted:
“the blue of the sky, the green of trees, the serene or threatening character of a landscape, the sweetness of scents, the beauty of shapes of old cities or the dread in the monstrous suburbs of our time.”
From a normative perspective, Henry claims that the knowledge of life is the primordial knowledge. The evolution of modern scientific knowledge has inverted the orders of knowledge, until it reached a point where it tries to derive the lived experience from an objective third person perspective, of which the hard problem of consciousness is the ultimate expression: how can a phenomenal subject even exist if we start from the natural physical world as conceived by the mind?
In his short essay, What Science Doesn’t Know, found HERE, Henry writes :
“By dismissing the sensible qualities of the world, Galilean science actually abolishes this absolute phenomenological life (the immediate experiencing of oneself present in every fear, in every pleasure, in every sensation, etc.) from its research. And here one
clearly sees that two paths open up before the human mind and that, choosing one or the other is one’s destiny: one must decide between life and death.
Regarding appearances as illusion is the supreme illusion. For every appearance is proof of itself by the very fact that it appears:
appearance is, in its appearing, the basis of every assertion and of every possible truth.
Thus in his last great work Husserl demonstrated that all the idealities and conceptualizations of science must refer to this sensible world that they are supposed to explain, they are erected on the previously given ground of the sensible world, assume it and only have meaning in relation to it.
What is more, these idealities and conceptualizations do not exist in nature: for example, neither circles nor squares are found in nature; instead there are only curves and sensible outlines from which the geometric shapes evolve through a process of ideation.
However this process is an act of consciousness, of that very subjectivity that has been presumed to be illusory and without which science and all its conceptual edifices would not exist.
Further, by creating from the sensible givens of the world the intelligible base that must be accounted for, science develops entirely inside of this experience of the world whose fundamental structures—space, time, causality, etc.—it presupposes.
More radically it assumes that the world itself, i.e. this space of light spread before our gaze, this horizon of visibility inside of which all that we are able to see—whether with our eyes of flesh or with those of the mind—appears.
In other words, scientific experience develops in the prolongation of perceptual experience, as it perceives only objects. Being an object means to be placed before, to become visible, to appear to an eventual gaze, in such a way that it is the fact of being placed before, it is the objectivity of the object, the exteriority of the world that creates visibility, the phenomenality of all that is found placed in this condition of being an object.
What then is an experience in which there is neither an object nor a world, and the content of which has escaped both the perceptual gaze as well as the gaze of science?
Such however is the essence of life, the phenomenological life that experiences and realizes itself interiorly without ever hollowing out, between it and itself, the distancing of a world (l’écart d’un monde), the place of any object. Life that can neither be seen nor understood in the sense of science, certainly, but which is no less unquestionable or incontestable, and which on the order of a fear, desire or sensation is found to be necessary, in that we experience it, and as we experience it.
This then is what science does not know: our life. This life is not something (as is the case for biological life for example) but rather a knowing, the first and most essential knowing of all, the one that presupposes all the others. For every knowledge by which we
know the world (whether it is a question of the sensible world or of the world of geometrico-mathematical idealities)—seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding—would not be if they weren’t first living, if they didn’t experience themselves interiorly and thus know themselves with a nonobjective and irrepresentable knowledge in the very act by which they see, hear, understand, etc.”
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