Abstract
It has been widely argued that Michel Henry dismisses the importance of the subject’s worldly and intentional mode of existence in his account of the well-being of life. However, through a careful analysis of Henry’s theory of life and his study of culture and barbarism, I will demonstrate that the prevailing position on this point is both correct and incorrect: (i) correct in that absolute life does not require a moral transformation of the world; and (ii) incorrect inasmuch as Henry’s philosophy does not, for all that, deny that, from the perspective of human beings, the subject’s existence in the world does indeed matter to the well-being of their life. In my view, Henry’s work harbours the implication that, from the perspective of the subject’s existence in the world, the creation of a moral world through the development of the correspondence between one’s inner life and the natural world is humanity’s most pressing task, to the point that his entire phenomenology is oriented toward the achievement of this end. I will highlight two of the ways in which the subject’s existence is vital to life’s well-being: (i) as an expression of life; and (ii) as more or less befitting of life’s current needs. As part of this study, I argue that some of Henry’s conclusions regarding theoretical knowledge and its part in the aforementioned correspondence between life and the natural world do not entirely agree with his own analyses and therefore need to be reformed.
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Notes
As Henry writes, “‘[m]atter,’ which material phenomenology understands in its clear opposition to the hyletic, no longer indicates the other of phenomenality but its essence. To the extent that in pure givenness it thematizes and explains its own self-givenness, material phenomenology is phenomenology in a radical sense” (Henry, 2008: 42).
For example, in I Am the Truth, Henry maintains that death and destruction are essentially connected to the world’s way of appearing. As he writes, “if there existed no other truth than that of the world—there would be no reality at all anywhere but only, on all sides, death. Destruction and death are not the work of time being exercised after the fact on some reality preexisting time’s reach; rather, they strike a priori everything that appears in time, as the very law of its appearance—everything that is shown in the truth of the world, as the very law of this truth” (Henry, 2003: 20).
In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl himself advances the claim that phenomenology is essentially about the study of how objects appear (Husserl, 1999: 24).
According to Henry, Husserl and, especially, Heidegger fail to treat the immanence of the subject in a sufficiently pure way (Henry, 1989: 50). Both of these figures, as well as most of those in the history of Western philosophy, have fallen victim to what Henry regards as the most basic assumption in all knowledge, namely, that there is only one mode of appearing, that of the world, understood as the visible display opened by the horizons of intentional consciousness. Henry refers to this unwarranted assumption as ontological monism (Henry, 1973: 89).
As Henry further explains, “[e]veryone knows very well, with an absolute and uninterrupted knowledge, what his flesh is, even if he is not able to express this knowledge conceptually” (Henry, 2000: 9).
In his famous and no less influential work Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, Janicaud counts Henry among a group of new phenomenologists who break with phenomenological orthodoxy and consider God and religious experience more generally (2000: 16).
As Husserl writes, “[i]mmediate ‘seeing,’ not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever, is the ultimate legitimizing source of all rational assertions” (Husserl, 1983: 36).
For a more extensive analysis of Henry’s relation to Kierkegaard, see Tambourgi-Hatem (2006: 195–210).
Henry uses the terms work and labor interchangeably.
In Henry’s view, modern-day barbarism primarily unfolds through certain developments in science, technology, and economics. For more on this see (Henry, 2012: 47, 52f.).
Henry’s critique of barbarism appears to be influenced by Husserl’s critique of science in The Crisis. See (Husserl, 1770: 299).
For more on Henry’s study of art and aesthetics, see Giraud (2012).
For an extended discussion of Henry’s ethics, see Seyler (2010).
In fact, though Henry finds in Nietzsche’s philosophy a precursor to his own phenomenology of life, he would have done well to keep the late German philosopher in mind when engaging in his critique of the history of ideas.
Of course, this is not the place to provide an extensive account of the monumental and the antiquarian relations to history. For more on this matter, see Nietzsche (2006).
For Hegel, the beautiful soul is one who refrains from moral action yet judges the shortcomings of others (Hegel, 1977: 406f.).
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