Michel Henry


Michel Henry was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.

Life and work

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 in 1963 a doctoral thesis from the University of Paris, titled L'essence de la manifestation, under the direction of Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, 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.

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; it is an always begun again passage from suffering to 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.

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.

Critique of Western philosophy

as a whole since its Greek origins recognizes only the visible world and exteriority as the sole form of manifestation. It is trapped into what in The Essence of Manifestation Michel Henry calls "ontological monism"; it completely ignores the invisible interiority of life, its radical immanence and its original mode of revelation which is irreducible to any form of transcendence or to any exteriority. When subjectivity or life are in question, they are never grasped in their purity; they are systematically reduced to biological life, to their external relation with the world, or as in Husserl to an intentionality, i.e. an orientation of consciousness towards an object outside it.
Henry rejects materialism, which admits only matter as reality, because the manifestation of matter in the transcendence of the world always presupposes life's self-revelation, whether in order to accede to it, or to be able to see it or touch it. He equally rejects idealism, which reduces being to thought and is in principle incapable of grasping the reality of being which it reduces to an unreal image, to a simple representation. For Michel Henry, the revelation of the absolute resides in affectivity and is constituted by it.
The deep originality of Michel Henry's thought and its radical novelty in relation to all preceding philosophy explains its fairly limited reception. It is however a philosophy that is admired for its "rigor" and its "depth". But his thought is both "difficult" and "demanding", despite the simplicity and immediacy of its central and unique theme of phenomenological life, the experience of which it tries to communicate. It is the immediacy and absolute transparency of life which explains the difficulty of grasping it as a thought: it is much easier to speak of what we see than of this invisible life, which fundamentally avoids being seen from the outside.

Reception of Henry's philosophy

His thesis on The Essence of Manifestation was warmly welcomed by the members of the jury, who recognized the intellectual value and the seriousness of its author, although this thesis did not have any influence on their later works. His book on Marx was rejected by Marxists, who were harshly criticized, as well as by those who refused to see in Marx a philosopher and who reduced him to an ideologue responsible from Marxism. His book on Barbarism was considered by some as a rather simplistic and overly trenchant anti-scientific discourse. Nevertheless, it seems that science and technology too often pursue their blind and unrestrained development in defiance of life.
His works on Christianity seem rather to have disappointed certain professional theologians and Catholic exegetes, who contented themselves with picking out and correcting what they considered as "dogmatic errors". His phenomenology of life was the subject of a pamphlet on Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française by Dominique Janicaud, who sees in the immanence of life only the affirmation of a tautological interiority. On the other hand, Antoine Vidalin published a book entitled La parole de la Vie in which he shows that Michel Henry's phenomenology allows for a renewed approach to every area of theology.
As Alain David says in an article published in the French journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger, the thought of Michel Henry seems so radical, it affects our habitual ways of thinking so deeply, that it has had a difficult reception, even if all his readers declare themselves impressed by its "power", by the "staggering effect" of a thought which "sweeps everything clean on its way through", which "prompts admiration", but nevertheless "doesn’t really convince", as we don't know whether we are confronted by "the violence of a prophetic voice or by pure madness". In the same journal, Rolf Kühn also asserts, in order to explain the difficult reception of Michel Henry's work, that "if we do not side with any power in this world, we inevitably submit to silence and to criticism from every possible power, because we remind each institution that its visible or apparent power is, in fact, only powerlessness, because nobody gives himself over to absolute phenomenological life".
His books have been translated into many languages, notably English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. A substantial amount of work has been dedicated to him, mainly in French, but also in German, Spanish and Italian. A number of international seminars have also been dedicated to the thought of Michel Henry in Beirut, Cerisy, Namur, Prague, Montpellier, Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve in 2010. Michel Henry is considered by the specialists who know his work and recognize its value as one of the most important contemporary philosophers, and his phenomenology of life has started to gain a following. A Michel Henry Study Center has been established at St Joseph's University in Beirut under the direction of Professor Jad Hatem.
Since 2006, the archives of the philosopher have been deposited by his wife at the Catholic University of Louvain, where they form the Michel Henry archives Fund, placed under the direction of Jean Leclercq. An annual review, called Revue internationale Michel Henry, is also edited by this Fund in collaboration with the Presses universitaires de Louvain since 2010.
A newsletter on Michel Henry in French, called La gazette d'Aliahova, is published every month by Roland Vaschalde since 2010. The goal of this publication is to keep informed of the articles, books, courses, seminars and meetings on the thought of Michel Henry.

Consequences of Henry's philosophy

On the Body and Subjectivity

Philosophy and phenomenology of the body (1965)

The different philosophical systems all agreed, despite the diversity of their theories concerning the body, on the decisive doctrine of the belonging of the body to the being of the world. The first and the unique philosopher who understood the necessity of determining originally or fundamentally our body as a 'subjective body' is Maine de Biran, who Michel Henry calls a 'prince of thought', and who deserves according to him to be considered as well as Descartes and Husserl as one of the true founders of a phenomenological science of human reality.
According to Maine de Biran, the being or the reality of the ego does not reside in the immobility of substance-thought, as in the cogito of Descartes, but in the inner experience of a personal and purely subjective effort in its accomplishment. This is with this personal and purely subjective effort that begins and ends, according to Maine de Biran, the very being of the ego or its inner reality. The being or the true reality of the ego is no longer reduced to a pure thought whose nature is limited to the external knowledge of extension and to the contemplation of the external world. According to Maine de Biran, the ego is first a power that manifests itself in the subjective effort he accomplishes at each time, so that the cogito does not have for him the signification of being an 'I think' but on the opposite of being an 'I can'.
The depth of the philosophy of Maine de Biran resides according to Michel Henry in the affirmation that the true being of the movement, but also of the action and of the power of the ego is accurately that of a cogito or of a subjectivity. According to Michel Henry, the philosophical and ontological consequences of this thesis are infinite. By affirming like this the belonging of the true being of movement to what Michel Henry calls the "sphere of the absolute immanence of subjectivity", Maine de Biran proposes in reality "an entirely new theory" of the way whose knowledge of movement is given to us. This knowledge of movement is that of the personal and immanent experience that everyone does of its own subjective body and of its own life. Consequently, movement is known to us in both an inner and immediate way, which consequently concerns an absolute certainty.
Michel Henry is finally led at the end of his reflexion to distinguish three different bodies: 1) The original being of the subjective body, which is the absolute body of subjectivity as revealed in the internal experience of the movement, and which possesses the immediate power to move its organs and knows this power with an inner and immanent knowledge; this subjective body is a fundamental 'I can' and its being is a pure revelation of itself. 2) The organic body, which is the immediate and moving terminus of the subjective body, or rather the ensemble of the termini over which movement has a hold; it is the transcendent medium that gives up to the effort of our movement ; it is divided into various transcendent masses whose unity is provided by the subjective body. 3) The transcendent or objective body, which manifests in the external world, where it appears with the signification of being mine; the objective body can be the theme of scientific research ; this is the only body known by the philosophical tradition.
According to Michel Henry, the world consists in the totality of the contents of all experiences that can live or feel our subjective body, it is in reality the terminus or the limit of all our real, possible and imaginable movements that we can accomplish. The power of acting, that Michel Henry also calls the habit, is finally the real and concrete possibility of a world being given to us, it is a "possibility of knowledge in general". The world is the terminus or the outcome of all our subjective power and of all our habits, and it is for this reason that we are truly its inhabitants. The body is however not an instantaneous knowledge, it is on the contrary a permanent knowledge which coincides with our own existence, so that we can say that the subjective body as a whole is memory. As underlined by Michel Henry, "habit is the foundation for memory", which significates that the original being of the subjective body is a "possibility of knowledge in general", that's to say a knowledge or a memory of the world in its absence, and consequently an immanent memory of its forms.

Genealogy of psychoanalysis (1985)

Michel Henry undertook a study of the historical and philosophical genesis of psychoanalysis in the light of phenomenology of life in Généalogie de la psychanalyse, le commencement perdu, in which he shows that the Freudian notion of the unconscious results from the inability of Freud, its founder, to think the essence of life in its purity as affectivity and auto-affection. The repressed representation does not come from the unconscious, it is simply unformed: the unconscious is only an empty representation, it does not exist—or rather, the real unconscious is life itself in its pathetic reality. And it is not repression that provokes anguish, whose existence depends on the mere fact of power, but unused psychic energy or libido. As for the notion of consciousness, it simply means the power of seeing, it is nothing but a consciousness of the object which leads to an empty subjectivity.

The Book of the Dead (not published)

Henry's planned last book was entitled Le Livre des Morts and would have dealt with what he called "clandestine subjectivity": a theme which evokes the condition of life in the modern world and which also alludes to his commitment to the Resistance and his personal experience of clandestinity.

On Economy and Politics

Marx (1976)

Michel Henry wrote an important work on Karl Marx, whom he considers, paradoxically, as one of the leading Christian thinkers and one of the most important western philosophers, due to the weight he gives in his thought to living work and to the living individual in which he sees the foundation of economic reality. One reason why Marx's genuine thought has been so misunderstood is the complete ignorance of his fundamental philosophical writings during the development of the official doctrine of Marxism, due to their very late publication — for example, The German Ideology only appeared in 1932.
But the real reason for ignorance of Marx's philosophical texts is Marxism's negation, from its earliest days, of subjectivity, because Marxism is nothing other than a repetition of Hegelianism, which is a philosophy of objectivity which reduces the individual to the effective becoming of the Absolute and its manifestation in the light of ek-static exteriority. This work on Marx was published in two volumes entitled respectively Marx I. Une philosophie de la réalité and Marx II. Une philosophie de l’économie, translated in English as Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality.

From Communism to Capitalism (1990)

Communism and Capitalism are for Michel Henry two faces of the one death, which consists in the negation of life. Communism eliminates individual life in favour of universal abstractions like society, people, history or social classes. Marxism is according to Michel Henry a form of fascism, i.e. a doctrine which originates in the degradation of the individual whose elimination is considered as legitimate, whereas capitalism substitutes economic entities such as money, profit or interest for the real needs of life.
Capitalism however recognizes life as a source of value, wages being the objective representation of real subjective and living work. But capitalism progressively gives way to the exclusion of subjectivity by modern technology, which replaces living work by automated technological processes, eliminating at one stroke the power of creating value and ultimately value itself: possessions are produced in abundance, but unemployment increases and there is a continual shortage of money to buy them. These themes are developed in Du communisme au capitalisme, théorie d’une catastrophe.
The initial title of this book should have been The two faces death, but this title has been refused by the editor 'for obvious reasons of international actuality', as confided Michel Henry in an interview with Olivier Salazar-Ferrer published in 1991 in the Agones review.

On Culture and Barbarism

Barbarism (1987)

In his essay Barbarism, Michel Henry examines science, which is founded on the idea of a universal and as such objective truth, and which therefore leads to the elimination of the sensible qualities of the world, sensibility and life. There is nothing wrong with science in itself as long as it is restricted to the study of nature, but it tends to exclude all traditional forms of culture, such as art, ethics and religion. Science left to its own devices leads to technology, whose blind processes develop themselves independently in a monstrous fashion with no reference to life.
Science is a form of culture in which life denies itself and refuses itself any value. It is a practical negation of life, which develops into a theoretical negation in the form of ideologies that reduces all possible knowledge to that of science, such as the human sciences whose very objectivity deprives them of their object: what value do statistics have faced with suicide, what do they say about the anguish and the despair that produce it? These ideologies have invaded the university, and are precipitating it to its destruction by eliminating life from research and teaching. Television is the truth of technology; it is the practice par excellence of barbarism: it reduces every event to current affairs, to incoherent and insignificant facts.
This negation of life results, according to Michel Henry, from the "disease of life", from its secret dissatisfaction with the self which leads it to deny itself, to flee itself in order to escape its anguish and its own suffering. In the modern world, we are almost all condemned from childhood to flee our anguish and our proper life in the mediocrity of the media universe — an escape from self and a dissatisfaction which lead to violence — rather than resorting to the most highly developed traditional forms of culture which enable the overcoming of this suffering and its transformation into joy. Culture subsists, despite everything, but in a kind of incognito; in our materialist society, which is sinking into barbarism, it must necessarily operate in a clandestine way.

Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

Michel Henry was a student of ancient painting and of the great classical painting which preceded the scientistic figuration of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and also of abstract creations such as those of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Henry dedicated a book entitled Voir l’invisible to Kandinsky, in which he describes his work in laudatory terms. He analyses Kandinsky's theoretical writings on art and painting in their spiritual and cultural dimensions as a means of self-growth and refinement of one's sensibility. He explores painting's means of form and colour, and studies their effects on the inner life of one who looks at them filled with wonder, following the rigorous and almost phenomenological analysis proposed by Kandinsky. He explains that every form of painting capable of moving us is in reality abstract, i.e. it is not content to reproduce the world but seeks to express the invisible power and invisible life that we are. He evokes also the great thought of Kandinsky, the synthesis of arts, their unity in the monumental art as well as the cosmic dimension of art.

On Religion and Christianity

I am the Truth (1996)

In C’est moi la Vérité, pour une philosophie du christianisme, Michel Henry confronts his phenomenology of life with the foundational texts of Christianity. Life loves itself with an infinite love and never ceases to engender itself; it never ceases to engender each one of us as its beloved Son or Daughter in the eternal present of life. Life is nothing but this absolute love that religion calls God. That is why Life is sacred, and it is for this reason that no-one has the right to assault another or attack another's life.
The problem of evil is that of the inner and phenomenological "death" of the apparently or externally "living" individuals who do it; that is in reality, of the inner, affective and spiritual degeneration from their original condition of Son of God, when life they carry in them "turns" against itself in the terrible phenomena of hate and resentment. Because as John says in his first epistle, anyone who does not love remains in death, whereas everyone who loves has been born of God. The commandment of love is not an ethical law, but Life itself.
This work also proposes a phenomenology of Christ, who is understood as the First Living Being. A living being is simply that which succeeds in the pure revelation of self or self-revelation that is Life. It is in the form of an effective and singular Ipseity that Life never ceases to engender itself. It never ceases to occur in the form of a singular Self that embraces itself, experiences itself and finds joy in itself, and that Michel Henry calls the First Living Being. Or again the Arch-Son, as he himself inhabits the Origin and the Beginning, and is engendered in the very process whereby the Father engenders himself.
Michel Henry tells us in this book that the purpose of the coming of Christ into the world is to make the true Father manifest to people, and thus to save them from the forgetting of Life in which they stand. A forgetting which leads them falsely to believe themselves as being the source of their own powers, their own pleasures and their own feelings, and to live in the terrifying lack of that which however gives each ego to itself. The plenitude of life and the feeling of satisfaction it brings must yield to the great Rift, to the Desire that no object can fulfill, to the Hunger that nothing can satisfy.

Words of Christ (2002)

As Henry says in his last book Paroles du Christ, it is in the heart that life speaks, in its immediate pathetic self-revelation; but the heart is blind to the Truth, it is deaf to the word of Life, it is hard and selfish, and it is from this that evil comes. It is in the violence of its silent and implacable self-revelation, which bears witness against this degenerate life and against the evil that comes from it, that Judgement stands — Judgement which is identical to the advent of each Self to itself and from which none can escape.

Incarnation. A philosophy of Flesh (2000)

In Incarnation. A philosophy of Flesh, Henry starts by opposing the sensible and living flesh as we experience it perpetually from the inside to the inert and material body as we can see it from the outside, like other objects we find in the world. The flesh does not correspond at all, in his terminology, to the soft part of our material and objective body as opposed for example to the bones, but to what he called in his earlier books our subjective body. For Henry, an object possesses no interiority, it is not living, it does not feel itself and does not feel that it is touched, it does not subjectively experience being touched.
Having put the difficult problem of the incarnation in a historical perspective by going back to the thought of the Church Fathers, he undertakes a critical re-reading of the phenomenological tradition that leads to a reversal of phenomenology. He then proposes to elaborate a phenomenology of the flesh which leads to the notion of an originary flesh which is not constituted but is given in the arch-revelation of Life, as well as a phenomenology of Incarnation.
Although the flesh is traditionally understood as the seat of sin, in Christianity it is also the place of salvation, which consists in the deification of man, i.e. in the fact of becoming the Son of God, of returning to the eternal and absolute Life we had forgotten in losing ourselves in the world, in caring only about things and ourselves. In sin, we have the tragic experience of our powerlessness to do the good we would like to do and of our inability to avoid evil. Thus, faced with the magical body of the other, it is the anguished desire to rejoin the life in it that leads to error. In the night of lovers, the sexual act couples two impulsive movements, but erotic desire fails to attain the pleasure of the other just there where it is experienced, in a complete loving fusion. The erotic relation is however doubled by a pure affective relation, foreign to the carnal coupling, a relation made of mutual gratitude or love. It is this affective dimension that is denied in the form of violence that is pornography, which wrenches the erotic relation from the pathos of life in order to deliver it to the world, and which constitutes a genuine profanation of life.

Descriptions of selected works

On Economy and Politics