Michel Henry (French: [ɑ̃ʁi]; 10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States of America, and Japan.

Biography[edit]
Michel Henry was born in Haiphong, French Indochina (now Vietnam), 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.[1] 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.[2]

At the end of the war he took the final part of the philosophy examination at the university, following which he wrote a thesis 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.[3]

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.[4][5] Le sujet unique de sa philosophie, c’est la subjectivité vivante, c’est-à-dire la vie réelle des individus vivants, cette vie qui traverse toute son œuvre et qui en assure la profonde unité en dépit de la diversité des thèmes abordés.[6] 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.[7] It has been suggested that he proposed the most profound theory of subjectivity in the Twentieth Century.

A phenomenology of life[edit]
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".[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]

Henry defines life from a phenomenological point of view as what possesses the faculty and the power "to feel and to experience oneself in every point of its being".[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]

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.[14] 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.[15][16] 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 (from the French word pathétique which means capable of feeling something like suffering or joy).[17]

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.[18] This life is the personal and finite life of men, or the personal and infinite life of God.

Two modes of manifestation[edit]
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.[19] 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.[20]

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.[21]

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.[22]

Originality of Henry's thought[edit]
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.[23] 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.[24]

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.[25]

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".[26][27][28][29] 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.[30] 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[31] · .[32]

Reception of Henry's philosophy[edit]
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.[33] 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.[34] 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.[35]

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”.[36] His phenomenology of Life was the subject of a pamphlet on Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology) by Dominique Janicaud, who sees in the immanence of life only the affirmation of a tautological interiority.[37] On the other hand, Antoine Vidalin published a book entitled La parole de la Vie (The Word of Life) in which he shows that Michel Henry's phenomenology allows for a renewed approach to every area of theology.[38]

As Alain David says in an article published in the French journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger (number 3, July – September 2001),[39] 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".[40] 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".[41]

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 those who know his work and recognize its value as one of the most important contemporary philosophers,[42][43][44] 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 (Lebanon) 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 (Belgium), 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.

An information letter on Michel Henry in French, called La gazette d'Aliahova (in reference to the town of Aliahova described in the Michel Henry novel L'Amour les yeux fermés), 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.
barbarie alla vita come auto-manifestazione. La proposta fenomenologica di Michel Henry, Aracne, 2010

hani2348:
So this is the reason behind me not sleeping this week [/color][color=#770077]

eya

without the exams you might not be able to write those things you wrote on him or correct yourself when you made mistakes on certain things that concern your education.you should be grateful instead