Michel Henry: Other

“The community is a subterranean affective layer and each one drinks the same water at this source and at from this wellspring which he is itself -- but without knowing it, without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the Basis.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, éd. PUF, 1990, p. 178
Books on Phenomenology of Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)
Original: (co) La communauté est une nappe affective souterraine et chacun boit la même eau à cette source et à ce puits qu'il est lui-même – mais sans le savoir, sans se distinguer de lui-même, de l'autre ni du Fond.

Self-confidence , Water , Drink , Communication

“Life is given in its own way, in a completely unique way, even though this singular mode of givenness is universal. Life is given in such a way that what it gives is given to itself and that what it gives to itself is never separated from it, not in the least. In this way, what life gives is itself. Life is self-givenness in a radical and rigorous sense, in the sense that it is both life that gives and life that is given. Because it is life that gives, we can only have a share of this gift in life. No road leads to life except life itself. [...] Life is absolute subjectivity inasmuch as it experiences itself and is nothing other than that experience. It is the pure fact of experiencing itself immediately and without any distance. This is what constitutes the essence of every possible community. Again, what is shared in common is not some thing; instead, it is this original givenness as self-givenness. It is the internal experience that brings to life everything that is and makes what is alive in this experience become alive in and through it alone.”

Michel Henry

Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 120
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)

Communication , Universe , Self-confidence , Way

“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

“Life confers a value on things -- they do not have any value by themselves -- inasmuch as they are suited to it and satisfy its desires. But this spontaneous evaluation by life is only possible, in turn, if life experiences itself, even through its most humble needs, as what it is and must be, as an absolute value. The fundamental values have no other content than what is implied in life's first experience of itself; they are the proper content of this life.”

Michel Henry

Michel Henry, Barbarism, Continuum, 2012, p. 97
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Barbarism (1987)

Life

“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

“Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature.”

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. 27-28

Knowledge , Life , God , Learning

“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

“Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterizes any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that, taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, none of its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing. Since a word has nothing in itself that is identical or similar to what is in the thing, it could as well be united with any other thing whatever. One could use the same name for two different things or else attribute several names to the same thing. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it, in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it. Emerging from its own powerlessness, the power of language suddenly becomes frightening, shaking up reality, twisting it up in its frenzy.”

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. 9

Indifference , Reality , Universe , Evil

“This is the miracle of abstract painting: it constructs the unlimited monumentality of a work that no longer has a foothold in the visible world, that ignores its rules and does not seek anything from it, neither aid nor sanction, and that emerges with the pure force and infinite certainty of life. Withdrawn from the weight of things and from the inertial systems in which things are held and have their limited possibilities circumscribed, the work of art proceeds from the imagination. To imagine is to posit something other than what is and what is there right in front of us -- something other than the world. To imagine is to posit life.”

Michel Henry

Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)
Source: Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 107

Imagination , Painting , Life , World