Para una ecología de la vida

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.036.e202431817

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibility of an ecology of life in Michel Henry. We will ask whether his philosophy, which takes the world as unreality, is able to care for the consequences of the environmental impact. We will see that, although he has not provided for a constituted ecology, Henry has clearly stated that this issue was no stranger to his philosophical interests. In order to address it, we will focus on some considerations of Barbarism and other related texts, where the author expresses his concern for the deterioration of the environment and argues that the original sin of modern technique is to have made abstraction of life. This involves a substitution of the know-how as such (that is, of the technique in its essential, vital sense) by a particular know-how (that of modern technique, of Galilean inspiration). By doing this, modern technique substitutes real life for its unreal representation and, thus, it alienates it. This produces an ontological shock, as if the action had abandoned its own place to occur in the world. This was Modernity’s crucial event, by which the kingdom of the human gave way to that of the inhuman, from expulsion of life out of the world and from its devastation. Based on these considerations, we will ask: How could the abstraction of the world supplant the reality of life? Henry responds that, not for being unreal, the representation of life stops filling the entire world of representation. In addition, he refers to a self-objectivation of transcendental life, which raises new questions: How can subjectivity have an ekstatic structure? How can immanence turn to transcendence? How can life be expelled from the process to which it belongs? How can the devastation of the world affect it? These are some of the open questions that Henry’s concern for the devastation of Earth passes on to us and that will boost us, in the conclusions, to rethink some fundamental issues, without having conclusive answers to offer but only a deepening of the problematics inherited.

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Author Biography

Carlos Belvedere, UBA/CONICET, UNGS

Doutor em Ciências Sociais pela Universidade de Buenos Aires

Published

2024-12-05

How to Cite

Belvedere, C. (2024). Para una ecología de la vida. Revista De Filosofia Aurora, 36. https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.036.e202431817

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