References
- Thanks go to Dr John J. Drummond, Christopher Arroyo and Kem Crimmins for their patience in reviewing and commenting on several early instantiations of this essay. All remaining deficiencies are, of course, my own.
- M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 47–102. All references to this work follow the pagination of Etzkom's English translation.
- D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 51. The urgency of this problem comes into relief when one recalls that phenomenology's principle of principles claims to base its description on that which is given to subjectivity in phenomenological reflection. Hence, it is of the utmost importance that phenomenology explain the self's self-givenness as the condition for the possibility of all experience.
- While it is a matter of interpretation for which I must reserve judgement in this essay, Henry's reading of intentionality appears rather ‘un-Husserlian.’ According to Henry's conception of intentionality—which is true for Kant, perhaps, but not for Husserl—two things occur in an intentional relation between a subject and an object. First, the representation of that which appears necessarily replaces the actuality of the thing; and, second, everything that appears appears to someone.
- E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 41–46. Cf. J. Hart, “Michel Henry's Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian Reading of C'est moi, la vérité,” Husserl Studies 15, p. 185.
- J. Hart, “Michel Henry's Phenomenological Theology of Life”, p. 185.
- Cf.D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible”, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 32 (1999), p. 226.
- J. Hart, “A Phenomenological Theory and Critique of Culture: A Reading of Michel Henry's La Barbarie,” Continental Philosophy Review Vol. 32 (1999), p. 255. The capitalization of “Life” in this context serves to distinguish it from the intentional life of subjectivity. Henry, as we shall see, distinguishes between the pathos of existence, on the one hand, and the rational life of subjectivity and the life-world, on the other. We shall return to a fuller discussion of Henry's theory of Life in section 2. 1.
- Cf.M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1962), p. xiv.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” Continental Philosophy Review Vol. 32 (1999), p. 351.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. pp. 351–352.
- Cf.R. Bernet, “An Intentionality without Subject or Object?,” Man and World vol. 27 no. 3 (1994).
- M. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 170.
- D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” p. 227.
- Henry's criticism of the formalized conception of subjectivity shares a certain broad similarity with Sartre's critique of transcendental subjectivity in The Transcendence of the Ego, namely Sartre's objection that the self cannot be properly understood as a formal entity grounding intentional activity. For both Sartre and Henry, subjectivity must be thought together with what Sartre refers to as the fabric of being. Nevertheless, if phenomenology is to reunite consciousness with its original ontological condition, then it cannot (as Sartre thought it could) understand consciousness as pure, self-transcending intentionality. That the self's primordial mode of being is nothing other than its intentional state of self-transcendence, Henry refuses to accept. Indeed, he repudiates Sartre's theory of self-awareness for doing nothing more than “absolutiz[ing] the relationship of transcendence by making of the absence of foundation the characteristic and the essence of the foundation itself’ (EM 262 [325]).
- Cf. my “Self-Awareness and Ontological Monism: Why Kant is not an Ontological Monist,” Idealistic Studies vol. 32: 3 (2002), pp. 248–249. I argue that Sartre's non-positional, pre-reflective self not only appears to lack any sense of self-awareness to the extent that consciousness necessarily exists at a distance from itself, but also seems unable to achieve self-awareness reflexively, for it lacks the requisite senses of unity, familiarity, immediacy, and individuality that self-awareness entails. On the one hand, Sartre wants to speak of a unity between the pre-reflective and reflective self. This unity occurs, according to Sartre, when the subject reflects upon itself. On the other hand, Sartre unwaveringly identifies anonymity, no-thingness, as the primary feature of pre-reflective consciousness. When Sartre claims that the “I” of the self appears in the processes of reflection, however, does not the self's very recognition of itself presuppose and rest upon an irreducible circumstance of self-familiarity and identity unavailable to Sartre's anonymous self? To put the matter more directly, the claim that consciousness is not-the-thing of which it is conscious, even when reflecting upon itself, presupposes a sense of self-familiarity that would allow such a distinction to be made, but which Sartre's phenomenology refuses to admit. And since this primitive, pre-reflective self lacks awareness of itself, it could never distinguish itself, even negatively, from any other object. Without the “self’ of pre-reflective self-awareness, no distinction between self and other could ever be made.
- E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 1, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), section 28.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 346.
- For an alternative interpretation with respect to Henry's relation to Husserl's phenomenological reduction, see N. Depraz, “Seeking a Phenomenological Metaphysics: Henry's Reference to Meister Eckhart,” trans. G. Sadler, Continental Philosophy Review 32(1999): 303–324, p. 306.
- D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” p. 224. Cf. J. Hart, “Michel Henry's Phenomenological Theology of Life,” p. 185. Of course, Husserl has told us (and Henry agrees) that while we do not have the entire object in one glance, consciousness of the present profile is always accompanied by the object's absent profiles through recollection. Cf. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 41–46 [79–83].
- Henry's critique of Husserl's theory of time-consciousness, we shall see, fails as an interpretation and, moreover, this failure results in certain insoluble problems for Henry's alternative account of self-awareness. These points will be addressed in section 3.
- M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, pp. 483–485 [604–607] and 546–547 [684–685].
- Henry writes, “let us consider Husserl's example of joy experienced in the accomplishment of a fruitful phenomenological task. Let our gaze now be directed, not on the object of this task, but upon this joy; this joy is joy of the past and the affective tonality of consciousness which had been working and now observes itself is in any case modified. Such a modification is the following: in place of joy is substituted, in the place where it had unfolded its Being, in the sphere of radical immanence of the invisible, another tonality…. Nevertheless,…the realm modification of joy and its transformation into a new tonality [is] bound to the intervention of an objectifying gaze.” M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, pp. 546–547 [684–685], Cf., also, E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, p. 97.
- “Dès ce moment, en effet, la donation extatique de l'impression dans la conscience interne du temps a remplacé son auto-donation dans l'impressionalité et la question de l'impression est perdue de vue.” M. Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 49–50. Cited in D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 88.
- Cf.M. Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle, pp. 125 ff.
- J. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light,” in Self-Awareness, Temporality and Alterity, ed.D. Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 75.
- D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 113.
- D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” pp. 226–227. Cf. D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 113.
- Cf.M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, pp. X, XV.
- Cf.M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969). In this text, Merleau-Ponty rejects Husserl's theory of absolute time-constituting subjectivity for “tacitly assum[ing] a place of absolute contemplation from which…intentional explication is made,” for this assumption “blocks” subjectivity from the “spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness facing a noema),” pp. 243–44. Of course, Henry reconfigures this Merleau-Pontean criticism in terms of his theory of immanence wherein subjectivity's pre-reflective self-awareness makes possible the awareness of flesh facing the noema. Indeed, Henry would criticize Merleau-Ponty's theory as one of transcending, fractured subjectivity. And while this is not the appropriate place to discuss such matters, it appears that despite their surface differences Henry and (the later) Merleau-Ponty are discussing the same coin from opposite sides: the ontological unity of self and Life (VI 24).
- Undoubtedly, Sartre was aware of the phenomenological error of offering ontical descriptions of consciousness; indeed, the merit of his work lies more in his insight regarding the pre-reflective nature of the self than his method for describing it. Sartre's method, unfortunately, injects subjectivity directly into the intentional act that Henry argues we must get “behind.” Whereas Sartre believed himself to have founded a phenomenological ontology, Henry argues that insofar as the former places a non-substantial subject into the intentional act, which it supposedly precedes and founds, he offers merely another, more complex, ontical characterization of subjectivity: transcendent being-in-the-world amounts to nothing more than an ontic disclosure of the subject as a being among beings, i.e., another instance in the long line of follies for ontological monism.
- Cf.D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 113.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” pp. 351–352. At every point where the terms “life” and “world” appear in the just mentioned passage, one would do well to replace “life” with “Life” and “world” with “life-world.” These substitutions will serve as constant, helpful reminders of Henry's always implicit polemic against the ontologically monistic dimension of phenomenology. Particularly, one should recall that our reason for this substitution follows from Henry's belief that the phenomenological reduction and all intentionality operates—and this is Henry's criticism of Husserl's foundational notion of the living-present—by omitting the fundamental content or material of Life.
- M. Henry, “On Nietzsche's ‘We Good, Beautiful, Happy Ones!’”, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15, 2 (1991): 131–141; p. 133. Indeed, one commentator has described, albeit without reference to this essay, Henry's notion of life and self-manifestation as Dionysian. Cf. J. G. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality and Light,” p. 78.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 352.
- F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), section 1050.
- Cf.F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067. In this passage, Nietzsche describes his conception of the Dionysian in a manner that undoubtedly coincides with and reinforces Henry's rejection of the reduction. Ontologically, the Dionysian experience of Life denotes a non-utilitarian, non-intentional union of the force(s) of the universe. To experience Life as Dionysus does means to partake in the value of joy and suffering in the ultimate will of the eternal ontological process that forever discharges, expends and rejuvenates itself. An ever chaotic world oscillating between the ever joyful and ever fearful, the Dionysian points towards a unity of nature beyond all separation of opposites, an ocean, Nietzsche says, eternally agitated by self-identical forces.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 352.
- M. Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps (Paris: P. U. F., 1965), p. 127. Cited in D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” p. 232.
- J. Hart, “Michel Henry's Phenomenological Theory of Life,” p. 186.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 353.
- R. Bernet, “An Intentionality Without Subject or Object?,” p. 239.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 353.
- J. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light,” p. 65.
- Cf.E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. L. Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 62 ff. The reader should note that Husserl's sense of “immanence” should not be taken to resemble the empiricist or Kantian sense of impressions or representations, respectively.
- J. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light,” 65.
- Cf.M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers Inc, 1963), pp. 81–82.
- D. Zahavi, “The Fracture in Self-Awareness,” p. 24. Cf. also, D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 110.
- M. Henry, “Does the Concept ‘Soul’ Mean Anything?”, Philosophy Today, XII (1969): 94–114, p. 99.
- R. Bemet, “An Intentionality Without Subject or Object?”, p. 252.
- Cf.M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 127–131.
- Cf.D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible.”
- E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, p. 63.
- J. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light,” p. 78.
- D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 112.
- E. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (189301917), trans, J. B. Brough, Edmund Husserl, Collected Works IV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 123.
- Ibid., p. 394. Cf. J. G. Hart, “Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light,” p. 78.
- Cf.E. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. A. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 173–4, 182.
- J. G. Hart, “Michel Henry's Phenomenological Theory of Life,” p. 186.
- Cf.D. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, p. 115. Despite these supposed convergences, Zahavi himself notes no fewer than five fundamental limitations to Henry's theory of self-awareness. First, Henry never presents a convincing account of how this radically immanent subject can have an “inner temporal articulation.” Second, lacking an inner temporal articulation, Henry cannot account for the way in which this immanent self might simultaneously transcend itself toward the world. Third, if Henry's self cannot transcend itself, then it cannot recognize other subjects. Fourth, it becomes difficult to understand how this purely immanent self can be in possession of its own body. And, fifth, this purely immanent self without any internal differentiation cannot reflect on itself as an object across time and, therefore, cannot recollect past experiences. And an account of self-awareness that cannot account for the selfs identity over time seems as bankrupt as an account of self-awareness that purports to do the latter before establishing the former.
- D. Alison, Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2001), p. 18.
- M. Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, p. 127; my holding, Henry's italics. Cited in D. Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” p. 232.
- M. Henry, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, pathos and language),” p. 352; my holding, Henry's italics.