Michel Henry
Michel Henry was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote four novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.
Biography
Michel Henry was born in Haiphong, French Indochina, and he lived in French Indochina until he was seven years old. Following the death of his father, who was an officer in the French Navy, he and his mother settled in metropolitan France. While studying in Paris, he discovered a true passion for philosophy, which he decided to make his profession—he enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure, at the time part of the University of Paris. From June 1943 he was fully engaged with the French Resistance, joining the maquis of the Haut Jura under the code name of Kant. He often had to come down from the mountains in order to accomplish missions in Nazi-occupied Lyon, an experience of clandestinity that deeply marked his philosophy.At the end of the war he took the final part of the philosophy examination at the university, following which he wrote a doctoral thesis at the University of Paris in 1963, titled L'essence de la manifestation, under the direction of Jean Wahl. Other academic advisors included Paul Ricœur, Ferdinand Alquié, and Henri Gouhier. His first book, on the Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, was completed in 1950. His first significant published work was on The Essence of Manifestation, to which he devoted long years of necessary research in order to surmount the main deficiency of all intellectualist philosophy, the ignorance of life as experienced.
From 1960, Michel Henry was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier, where he patiently perfected his work, keeping himself away from philosophical fashions and far from dominant ideologies. He died in Albi, France, at the age of eighty.
The sole subject of his philosophy is living subjectivity, which is to say the real life of living individuals. This subject is found in all his work and ensures its deep unity in spite of the diversity of themes he tackled. It has been suggested that he proposed the most profound theory of subjectivity in the Twentieth Century.
Philosophy
A phenomenology of life
The work of Michel Henry is based on Phenomenology, which is the study of the phenomenon. The English/German/Latinate word "phenomenon" comes from the Greek "phainomenon" which means "that which shows itself by coming into the light". The everyday understanding of phenomenon as appearance is only possible as a negative derivation of this authentic sense of Greek self-showing. The object of phenomenology is not however something that appears, such as a particular thing or phenomena, but the act of appearing itself. Henry's thought led him to a reversal of Husserlian phenomenology, which acknowledges as phenomenon only that which appears in the world, or exteriority. Henry counterposed this conception of phenomenality with a radical phenomenology of life.Henry defines life from a phenomenological point of view as what possesses the faculty and the power "to feel and to experience oneself in each point of its being". For Henry, life is essentially force and affect; it is essentially invisible; it consists in a pure experience of itself which perpetually oscillates between suffering and joy; thought is for him only a mode of life, because it is not 'thought which gives access to life, but life that allows thought to reach itself'.
According to Henry, life can never be seen from the exterior, as it never appears in the exteriority of the world. Life feels itself and experiences itself in its invisible interiority and in its radical immanence. In the world, we never see life itself, but only living beings or living organisms; we cannot see life in them. In the same way, it is impossible to see another person's soul with the eyes or to perceive it at the end of a scalpel.
Henry's philosophy goes on to aver that we undergo life in a radical passivity, we are reduced to bear it permanently as what we have not wanted, and that this radical passivity of life is the foundation and the cause of suffering. No-one has ever given himself life. At the same time, the simple fact of living, of being alive and of feeling oneself instead of being nothing and of not existing is already the highest joy and the greatest happiness. Suffering and joy belong to the essence of life, they are the two fundamental affective tonalities of its manifestation and of its "pathetic" self-revelation.
For Henry, life is not a universal, blind, impersonal and abstract substance, it is necessarily the personal and concrete life of a living individual, it carries in it a consubstantial Ipseity which refers to the fact of being itself, to the fact of being a Self. This life is the personal and finite life of men, or the personal and infinite life of God. For Michel Henry, human life is indeed a finite life, because it is marked by a fundamental lack which manifests itself in particular in suffering, in dissatisfaction or in desire.
A theory of subjectivity
While the question of being regained importance in France in the posterity of Heidegger, and that the question of the subject was revived, Michel Henry has combined the most living contributions of philosophy to produce what remains today the last complete philosophical system. Life or "absolute phenomenological life" is the base or the foundation of this philosophical system, it is its radical presupposition and its "undeductible" principle, and so the essence or the foundation of all truth according to Michel Henry. Life escapes by principle and according to him to any "distanciation", to any transcendence, merging in the unity of a feeling the speculative power of a principle and the material presence of an experience.Being bullied or denied, returning its forces against itself, or on the opposite deploying itself freely as in the art, in the love or in the work, life through its multiple manifestations focalizes all the concerns of Michel Henry's thought. So phenomenology reaches according to Michel Henry its limits, as the "texture" of phenomenality itself and its simple manifestation refers constantly to the inner reality and to the effectivity of life, which it requires as a condition of possibility. This is the meaning of the title of the main work of Michel Henry, The essence of manifestation: the world appears behind a subject, who discovers this space of exteriority only because he is firstly in passive relation with himself, as being living.
But it is important to be precise and even to underline that for Michel Henry, the human is an incarnated being, he is not reduced to a “pure spirit who surveys the world” or to a “disincarnate subject, like the Kantian spectator of the Paralogisms”. And that for him, the subjectivity is identical with the body, which doesn't reduce at all to an external and objective body as it appears into the world, but which is on the opposite and in reality a subjective and living body which reveals itself permanently from the interior through the movement and sensing and by which we can act on the external world.
Two modes of manifestation
Two modes of manifestation of phenomena exist, according to Henry, which are two ways of appearing: "exteriority", which is the mode of manifestation of the visible world, and phenomenological "interiority", which is the mode of manifestation of invisible life. Our bodies, for instance, are in life given to us from the inside, which allows us, for example, to move our hands, and it also appears to us from the outside like any other object that we can see in the world.The "invisible", here, does not correspond to that which is too small to be seen with the naked eye, or to radiation to which the eye is not sensitive, but rather to life, which is forever invisible because it is radically immanent and never appears in the exteriority of the world. No one has ever seen a force, a thought or a feeling appear in the world in their inner reality; no one has ever found them by digging into the ground.
Some of his assertions seem paradoxical and difficult to understand at first glance, not only because they are taken out of context, but above all because our habits of thought make us reduce everything to its visible appearance in the world instead of trying to attain its invisible reality in life. It is this separation between visible appearance and invisible reality which allows the dissimulation of our real feelings and which grounds the possibility of sham and hypocrisy, which are forms of lies.
The absolute Truth of Life
Michel Henry explains in his book I am the Truth. Towards a Philosophy of Christianity what Christianity considers to be the Truth and which he calls "the Truth of Life". He shows that the Christian concept of Truth is opposed to what men habitually consider to be the truth, which originates in Greek thought and which he calls "the truth of the world". But what is truth? Truth is what shows itself and thus demonstrates its reality in its effective manifestation in us or in the world.The truth of the world designates an external and objective truth, a truth in which everything appears to our gaze in the form of a visible object at a distance from us, i.e. in the form of a representation which is distinct from what it shows: when we look at an apple, it is not the apple in itself that we see but a mere image of the apple that appears in our sensibility and which changes depending on the lighting or the angle from which we view it. In the same way, when we look at a person's face, it is not the person in herself that we see, but only an image of her face, her visible appearance in the world. According to this way of conceiving truth, life is nothing more than a set of objective properties characterised by the need to feed oneself or one's aptitude for reproduction.
In Christianity, Life is reduced to its internal reality, which is absolutely subjective and radically immanent. Considered in its phenomenological reality, Life is quite simply the faculty and the subjective ability to feel sensations, small pleasures or great hurts, to experience desires and feelings, to move our bodies from within by exerting subjective effort, or even to think. All such faculties possess the fundamental characteristic of appearing and manifesting themselves in themselves, with no gap or distance; we do not perceive them from outside our being or as present to our gaze, but only in us: we coincide with each of these abilities. Life is in itself the power of manifestation and revelation, and what it manifests is itself, in its feeling self-revelation — it is a power of revelation which is perpetually at work within us and which we continually forget.
The Truth of Life is absolutely subjective — that is, it is independent of our subjective beliefs and tastes. The perception of a coloured sensation or a pain, for example, is not a matter of personal preference but a fact and an incontestable inner experience which pertains to the absolute subjectivity of Life. The Truth of Life does not therefore differ in any way from that which it makes true, it is not distinct from that which manifests itself in it. Truth is manifestation itself in its pure inner revelation, and Life is what Christianity calls God.
The Truth of Life is not a relative truth which varies from one individual to another, but absolute Truth which is the inner foundation of each of our faculties and abilities, and which illuminates the least of our impressions. The Truth of Life is not an abstract and indifferent truth; on the contrary, it is that which is most essential for man, as it is this alone that can lead him to salvation in his inner identification with it and in becoming the Son of God, rather than losing himself in the world.