I Think Therefore We Are

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Villemot uses his account of Husserl to establish how starting over in phenomenology can be useful for replacing I with We in the transcendental exercise. One result of this way of thinking is to undo the exclusion that is formatted into any statement about ’we’, the exclusion of the unspoken ’they’. In a discovery likely to be of use in an era that reacts to diversity with desparate belonging, an individual consciousness works back to the starting point and finds not so much a community of I’s but rather that I in itself it is community. In its act of reducing or interrupting the flux of lived phenomena in order to grasp "things" in their absolute or transcendental nature, the Subject discovers "Moi, l’Humanité". It is as if the starting-again I, willing to live with the inevitable imperfection in the correlation of things with perceptions of things, and refusing to resolve the conflict by retreating into either relativism or objectivism, discovers every other consciousness in that common space or tension. Villemot develops this aspect of phenomenology until he reaches the point where the I discovers "we" to be an essential part of itself. Through his insistence on this aspect Villemot contributes to a more complex, paradox-rich elaboration of what it is to be and to act human. If the starting point is Descartes and his Cogito, Villemot’s account frees the subject from the cartesian dualistic choice betweeen solipsism (my consciousness is all that is) and a willed, empirical knowledge of the world (objectivized reality is all that is).

Michel Henry also wore a path back to the cogito, which more often than not led him to attack Descartes and his (in Henry’s reading) terrible choice in favor of objective knowing. In examining Henry’s approach to recommencement, Villemot finds the former’s vigorous rejection of objectification and representation to go too far, ending in needless manicheism. Nonetheless it is Henry’s commitment to applying the insights of phenomenology to the world around him that founds some of his best work, and makes his thought a valuable contribution to Villemot’s project of developing an inclusive Subject for acting responsibly in a world where humanity and tolerance are endangered phenomena. One of Henry’s principal contributions is the identification of barbary with a refusal to accept life as a force "which continually runs into and resists the objective thing", or in other words life as a force which disrupts the continual slide towards a remote representation which is passive, camped on its certitudes, providing refuge in the "thingification" of life.

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