Michel Henry: Being

“The spectacle of the beauty which embodies itself in a living being is infinitely more touching than that of the work the most grandiose.”

Michel Henry book L'Amour les yeux fermés

L'amour les yeux fermés (1976)
Original: (fr) Le spectacle de la beauté qui s'incarne dans un être vivant est infiniment plus émouvant que celui de l'œuvre la plus grandiose.

Michel Henry, L'Amour les yeux fermés, éd. Gallimard, 1976, p. 48

Beauty

“No object has ever had the experience of being touched.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, Incarnation: A philosophy of Flesh (2000)
Original: (fr) Aucun objet n'a jamais fait l'expérience d'être touché.

Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 295

“Because our flesh is nothing but what, feeling itself, suffering itself, sustaining itself and bearing itself and so enjoying from itself according to always reborning impressions, is able, for this reason, to feel the body which is exterior to it, to touch it as well as being touched by it. What the exterior body, the lifeless body of the material universe, is by principle incapable.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 8
Books on Religion and Christianity, Incarnation: A philosophy of Flesh (2000)
Original: (fr) Car notre chair n'est rien d'autre que cela qui, s'éprouvant, se souffrant, se subissant et se supportant soi-même et ainsi jouissant de soi selon des impressions toujours renaissantes, se trouve, pour cette raison, susceptible de sentir le corps qui lui est extérieur, de le toucher aussi bien que d'être touché par lui. Cela donc dont le corps extérieur, le corps inerte de l'univers matériel, est par principe incapable.

Universe , Suffering , Feeling

“If communication takes place between the artwork and the public, it is on the level of sensibility, through the emotions and their immanent modifications. It does not have anything to do with words, with collective, ideological or scientific representations, or with their critical, intellectual or literary formulations, in short, anything that is called culture. It is totally independent from that type of culture. This is why it is addressed to the group of people who ‘lack culture’. It is popular in the sense that it leads to what is most essential in each human being: one’s capacity to feel, to suffer and to love.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 73
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

People , Suffering , Communication , Sense

“Painting does not use language. Abstract painting teaches us this, and this is what gives it its power of expression. If colour does not relate to the feelings of our soul through an external relation but finds its true being in them – as a pure sensation and a pure experience – then it does not even need to translate, through a means, the abstract content of our invisible life. It coincides with our invisible life and is its pathos: its suffering, its boredom, its neglect or its joy.”

Michel Henry

Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)
Source: Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 72

Soul , Painting , Suffering , Joy

“Because practice is subjective, theory which is always the theory of an object, can't access to the reality of this practice, what it is in itself, but only represent it, in such a way that this representation lets out of itself the real being of practice, the effectivity of the doing. Theory does nothing.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Marx I. une philosophie de la réalité, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 353
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Parce que la pratique est subjective, la théorie qui est toujours la théorie d’un objet, ne peut atteindre la réalité de cette pratique, ce qu’elle est en elle-même, sa subjectivité précisément, mais seulement se la représenter, de telle manière que cette représentation laisse hors d’elle l’être réel de la pratique, l’effectivité du faire. La théorie ne fait rien.

Way , Reality

“But joy has nothing about which it may be joyful. Far to come after the coming of being and to marvel in front of it, joy is consubstantial with being, joy founds it and forms it.”

Michel Henry

Original: (fr) Mais la joie n'a rien au sujet de quoi elle puisse être joyeuse. Loin de venir après la venue de l'être et de s'émerveiller devant lui, elle lui est consubstantielle, le fonde et le constitue.
Source: Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 831
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)

Joy

“The power of the feeling is the gathering which edifies, the being seized by oneself, its blazing up, its fulguration, is the becoming of the being, the triumphant sudden appearance of the revelation. What becomes of, in the triumph of this sudden appearance, in the fulguration of the presence, in the Parousia and, lastly, when there is something instead of nothing, that’s the joy.”

Michel Henry

Original: (fr) La puissance du sentiment est le rassemblement édificateur, l’être saisi par soi, son embrasement, sa fulguration, est le devenir de l’être, le surgissement triomphant de la révélation. Ce qui advient, dans le triomphe de ce surgissement, dans la fulguration de la présence, dans la Parousie et, enfin, quand il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien, c’est la joie.
Source: Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 831
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)

Joy , Appearance , Feeling

“What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 71
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

Pain , Life , Feeling

“The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119
Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Idea , Life , Reality , Communication

“To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon -- the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. That is the task of material phenomenology. Prior to this being-toward-the-outside in which everything is properly speaking placed outside of itself and in which every reality is a priori emptied and dispossessed of itself and thus becomes its contrary, an irreality, and prior to the abandonment and undoing that is called death and that would be unable to exist on its own, material phenomenology is devoted to the discovery of the reign of a phenomenality that is constructed in such a surprising way that the thought that always thinks about the world never thinks about it. To the internal structure of this originary manifestation, there belongs no Outside, no Separation, no Ek-stasis. Its phenomenological substance is not visibility. None of the categories that have been used by philosophy since the Greeks at any rate, are appropriate for it.”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Question , Thinking , Way , Reality

“Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it is what makes every affect, ultimately every affection, and every thing possible. The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in view is the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself according to the how of its original phenomenalization. Life is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. For what could I know that could not appear ?”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2-3
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Appearance , Way , Sense , Life

“The question of phenomenology, which alone confers a proper object to philosophy, is what makes it into an autonomous discipline -- the fundamental discipline of knowledge -- and not just a mere reflexion after the fact on what the other sciences have found. This question is no longer concerned with the phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears but with appearing. The invaluable contribution of historical phenomenology is to become aware of this appearing and to analyze it in and of itself. This is its theme. Again, this must not simply be the repetition of the traditional philosophical problem of consciousness or the greek aletheia. For the illusion of common sense, science and past philosophies is to understand the being of the phenomenon always as a first putting at a distance, the arrival of an Outside in which everything becomes visible, a "phenomenon", in the light of this Outside.”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 2
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Understanding , Question , Light , Past

“Technology is nature without the human being. It is abstract nature, reduced to itself, delivered over to itself, exalting and expressing itself on its own. It develops in such a way that all the virtualities and potentialities within it must be actualized, for them and for what they are, for their own sake, so that everything is done that can be done, that is to say, everything that nature can become. It is a matter of making gold, going to the moon, building self-guiding and self-monitoring missiles that can decide on the moment to self-destruction – and destroy us. Technology is alchemy; it is the self-fulfillment of nature in place of the self-fulfillment of the life that we are. It is barbarism, the new barbarism of our time, in place of culture. Inasmuch as it puts the prescriptions and regulations of life out of play, it is not simply barbarism in its most extreme and inhumane form that has ever been known – it is sheer madness.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 52
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)

Madness , Nature , Life , Time

“Experiencing oneself as Life does is to enjoy oneself [jouir de soi]. Enjoyment does not presuppose any differences similar to those in which the world is born: it is homogeneous phenomenological material, a monolithic affective body whose phenomenality is affectivity as such. The self-revelation of Life is not a formal structure that can be conceived on the basis of “outside oneself” and in terms of its own structures, since these are bypassed, overcome while being maintained in this very bypassing. The self-revelation of life is its enjoyment, the primordial self-enjoyment that defines the essence of Living and thus of God himself. According to Christianity, God is Love. Love is nothing other than the self-revelation of God understood as in its pathetic phenomenological essence, specifically, the self-enjoyment of absolute Life. This is why the Love of God is the infinite love in which he eternally loves himself, and the revelation of God is none other than this Love.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 30

Love , Life , God , World

“Although it is not thought or some other form of knowledge, although it is not the truth of the world, that gives access to the Revelation of God, at least a single possibility persist, already mentioned as a simple matter of fact and now rendered unimpeachable. Access to God, understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to Him, is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so. There where God originally arrives in himself, in the phenomenalization of phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality proper – there alone is access to God. It is not that thought is lacking and so we cannot accede to the Revelation of God. Quite the contrary, it is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God – the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 27

Knowledge , God , Truth , Way

“I do not intend to ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false,” or to establish, for example, the former hypothesis. Rather, what will be in question here is what Christianity considers as truth – what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation. We are trying to understand the form of truth that circumscribes the domain of Christianity, the milieu in which it spreads, the air that it breaths, one might say – because there are many sorts of truths, many ways of being true or false. And we are also perhaps trying to get away from the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and that, as much in and of itself as in its multiple implications, determines the world in which we live.”

Michel Henry

Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Source: Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 1

Communication , Falseness , Understanding , Question