HIGHER EDUCATION AND BARBARISM: REFLECTIONS FROM MICHEL HENRY AND HIS PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

Abstract

The present reflections are the result of a study on the phenomenology of life, by Michel Henry. The objective of this article was to analyze Henry's fundamental arguments in the context of barbarism in Higher Education and the resulting contextualization of current challenges to teaching. The methodological path of such analysis took place through theoretical-bibliographic research, with conceptual appropriation of the Henry’s theory on phenomenology and its criticism of the hypertrophied scientific dimension, historically imposed on the University from the work Barbarism, whose central concepts were compared with texts by commentators. The results achieved through the present analysis demonstrate the gradual exclusion of significant elements of subjective life in the academic space, driven by a growing protagonism of technoeconomic and media forces, leading to the diagnosis of a process of destruction of the University as a human space of culture, par excellence. In this sense, it was concluded, as a great challenge for higher education today, the construction of a critical awareness about the issues diagnosed by Henry, through the proposition of a teaching practice that resumes the primacy of subjective life in the academic routine.