What is Manifestation Woven on Warp and Weft the Cogency of Michel Henry's Response Auto-Affective...

What is manifestation woven on, warp and weft? The cogency of Michel

Henry’s response, “Auto-affective life”

The focus of transcendental phenomenology is manifestation – appearance in its

appearing under the reduction. But Henry finds the near-exclusive preoccupation with

intentionality problematical, and early in The Essence of Manifestation he indicates

why:

What I want to say is that, regardless of the degree of adequacy in its theoretical

formulation ... the ecstatic becoming-present of Being allows its most intimate

essence, i.e. that which makes it life and each of us living beings, to escape it. This

book is dedicated to the clarification of this secret essence of our Being which will

prove to be ... nothing other than affectivity ... 1

What could this distinct mode of manifestation be? It promises to give affectivity, the

‘secret essence of our being,’ its due, and to lessen concern with the ‘becoming

present of being,’ which is the phenomenality given in intentionality. In presenting an

account of Henry’s radical phenomenology, we will critically discuss five fundamental

theses of Henry. Since each one (with the possible exception of the fifth) is essential

to the integrity of the whole work, interrogating them tests the cogency of Henry’s

claim for ‘auto-affective life.’

1. The foundation thesis in which hyletic (material) phenomenology, auto-

affectivity, is proposed as a solution to the problem that intentional

phenomenology cannot itself bring to light phenomenality because the

attempt would invite an infinite regress.2 “The essence of transcendence

resides in immanence.”3

2. The duality thesis4 - that auto-affectivity and intentionality are two radically

different modes of manifestation.

1 Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), xi-xii.

2 Gerhard Funke, “A Crucial Question in Transcendental Phenomenology: What is Appearance in its Appearing?” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4 (1973).

Dan Zahavi, “Subjectivity and Immanence in Michel Henry,” in Subjectivity and Transcendence, ed. A. Grøn, I. Damgaard, and S. Overgaard (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007).

3 Henry, Manifestation, 380.

4 Frédéric Seyler, “From Life to Existence: A Reconsideration of the Question of Intentionality in Michel Henry’s Ethics,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 20(2012). Seyler names these first two theses.

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3. The affect thesis – that auto-affectivity founds the affective life, which is

essentially non-intentional.5

4. The selfhood thesis – that auto-affectivity is immanent self awareness6 (in

contrast to the ‘transcendence of the ego’7 of intentionality).

5. The divinization thesis – that auto-affectivity is rooted in absolute auto-

affectivity, Life, which is divine.8

Space precludes discussion of a further thesis – that auto-affectivity is collective, and

provides a non-intentional solution to the problems of intersubjectivity and solipsism,

inadequately covered by Husserl in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations.

The set of theses which will be discussed, together test the argument that the

manifestation of intentionality is woven on self-affective life, and on self-affective life

as Henry portrays it. We will consider whether the fifth thesis is an essential element

of Henry’s core system.

We begin with Henry’s critique of intentionality and the development of a distinct,

founding mode of manifestation: the foundation thesis.

Classical phenomenology rests on the principle of intentionality, which allows the

manifestation of phenomena, appearances in their appearing. However,

consciousness cannot manifest its own transcendental structure as intentional object,

because (among other things) to address the question of the structure of

phenomenality by means of an intentional analysis risks infinite regress.9

In the face of this foundational issue for classical phenomenology, Henry argues that

a mode of manifestation other than intentionality must come into play:

… phenomenology is unable to provide the true response to its own question

because that response is sought from intentionality, and the self-revelation of

absolute subjectivity is understood from the outset as a self-constitution.10



7 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957).

8 Michel Henry, I am the Truth, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

9 John Protevi, “Philosophies of Consciousness and the Body,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. John Mullarkey and Beth Lord (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

10 Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3.

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Henry points to Husserl’s own (short and fragmented) discussion of hylē, the

unstructured, pre-reflective and non-intentional ‘stuff’ which will become an

intentional object.11 This impression is the event of a non-intentional mode of

manifestation. Hylē is not constituted by an act of consciousness but is purely given.

So the problem of the foundation of intentionality is solved by the prior event of non-

intentional, hyletic ‘revelation’. This distinct mode of manifestation is purely immanent

– since it is not intentional it does not ‘refer’ – and it provides, as it were, the matter

for intentional phenomenality. Thus the equation in classical phenomenology of being

and appearance, ‘ontological monism,’ no longer holds. Furthermore, hyletic

phenomenology is uninterrupted, immediate, immanent self-awareness. It is also

essentially affective.

Selfhood and affectivity will be treated to detailed critique below, but we ought to

consider at this stage the viability of Henry’s (and Husserl’s) account of hylē. For

there is a significant question regarding the phenomenology of this ‘stuff’ and the

claim that it is unstructured. Dermot Moran points out that, in fact, the world is always

a highly structured set of sensory perceivings: “There is a certain ‘affectedness’ of

the senses in a way that predisposes the object to appear in a certain way”.12 So the

idea of hylē is problematical. Merleau-Ponty does indeed question it both at the

beginning and at the end of Phenomenology of Perception.13

Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike

impact. … [T]his notion corresponds to nothing in our experience14… [E]lementary

perception is therefore already charged with meaning.15 …

He goes on to argue that it is false to assume that there is an unstructured flow of

sensation wich becomes meaningful after having been somehow ‘worked on’

cognitively.

The fact is that experience offers nothing like this, and we shall never, using the

[conception of the world as meaningless] as our starting-point, understand what a

field of vision is.16

11 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (First Book), trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), § 85, 246-250.

12 Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 144.

13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 3-5, 405.

14 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 3.



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Work within the psychology of perception has more than substantiated Merleau-

Ponty’s criticism of the notion of hylē. In particular, James Gibson argues for the

abandonment of the notion of sensory input. Indeed, the idea of raw sensation

leading to refined perception (and therefore the parallel view that material

phenomenology provides the stuff which becomes intentional phenomenology’s

noematic correlate) is a misconception. He points to such things as the complex

relationship between voluntary movement and the world as a perceptual array. Thus,

in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems:

[T]he inputs available for perception may not be the same as the inputs available for

sensation. There are inputs for perception, and also for the control of performance,

that have no discoverable sensations to correspond. The haptic system [‘grabbing’ -

the use of several sensory and motor modes to acquire perceptual information] … is

an apparatus by which the individual gets information about both the environment and

his body. He feels an object relative to the body and the body relative to an object. It

is the perceptual system by which animals and men are literally in touch with the

environment.17

The world is not meaningless sensation but informative ‘affordances’. The idea of

unstructured hylē, then, indicative of a material phenomenology temporally prior to

intentionality seems unsupported. This seems to threaten one understanding of

Henry’s project:

To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure

phenomenality but also 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.18

But it is threatened only if one maintains the cognitivist view that hylē becomes

noema in temporal sequence. Instead, affectivity, the mineness of experience19 and

the other features of material phenomenology may be regarded as concomitants of

intentionality as two parallel modes of manifestation, auto-affectivity silently

accompanying intentionality. (James G. Hart has a view close to this.) 20

17 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 97, 98.

18 Henry, Material Phenomenology, 2.

19 Wolfgang Fasching, “The Mineness of Experience,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2009).

20 James G. Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian Reading of C’est moi, la vérité.” Husserl Studies 15 (1999), 187.

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We move, then, to the duality thesis, already noting that it requires amending so as

to downplay the claim that intentionality arises from auto-affectivity. We shall

consider three issues regarding this putative duality: (a) that auto-affectivity is lived

rather than known, whereas intentionality is thetic awareness; (b) that auto-affectivity

is immanent in contrast to the transcendence of the intentional object, and (c) that –

consequently – immanent affectivity, sometimes described as invisible, only has

reality for us if expressed in the ‘visibilities’ of intentional consciousness.

Though the first distinction, in which we regard auto-affectivity as lived and

intentionality as known, seems to reflect the description by Henry of the invisibility of

the one and the visibility of the other, there is serious ambiguity. We have strong

statements from Henry of the absolute knowledge of auto-affectivity:

As a matter of fact, the aim of this work is to show that there exists absolute

knowledge and that the latter is ... the very milieu of existence, the very essence of

life.21

But, if auto-affectivity entails absolute knowledge (and it certainly is where one’s

indubitable self-awareness arises), nevertheless for it to be known it has to come to

the light of reflective, intentional consciousness:

The sphere of absolute knowledge is rigorously defined. The ontological task which

arrives at the determination of this sphere is none other than that which permits

reflection to posit the problem of self-knowledge on a correct basis.22

Henry is self-contradictory on this point. Is auto-affectivity in possession of

knowledge or not? Hart argues that, although auto-affectivity is described as a non-

intentional, entirely immanent mode of manifestation, “at the same time the manifest

nature of this realm is nothing without the intentional activity of reflection”.23

To turn to the comparison of intentionality and auto-affectivity in terms of immanence

and transcendence, the main requirement here is to clarify the distinction between

two loci of self-awareness: on the one hand, the mineness of the lifeworld and, on the

other hand, the awareness of oneself as immanent consciousness.

Henry effectively criticises classical phenomenology for enabling us to ‘connect’ with

ourselves only as an intentional object, he writes of the expulsion, the ‘exteriority’ of

the self. The precise focus of this portrayal of the nature of intentionality needs

elucidation, for Husserl regards the intentional correlation of noema and noesis as


22 Henry, Manifestation, 45 – my bold emphasis; as usual Henry provides lavish italicisation.

23 Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology,” 194.

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purely immanent, or (as he writes) within the ‘mental’ sphere. Does intentionality give

an opening to the transcendent or not?

... [I]t should be well heeded that here we are not speaking of a relation between

some psychological occurrence – called a mental process – and another real factual

existence – called an object – nor of a psychological connection taking place in

Objective actuality between one and the other. Rather we are speaking of mental

process purely...24

The edited text on the noema by Drummond and Embree25 repeatedly makes the

point that a significant distinction should be drawn between the ‘object as it is

intended’ and ‘the object which is intended’. This permits a characterization of

intentionality as either immanent or transcendent. However Heidegger26 effectively

flouts the distinction. The existence of Dasein is such that one already finds oneself

within the meaningful structure designated as ‘world.’ We find our selves in that

world, to which our comportment is directed. The idea of an ‘objective, impersonal

reality’, is whimsical. The duality of the transcendent physical world and the

immanent mental world is an illusion because the world I perceive and act in is

precisely the subjective reality of my lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty27 develops this line of

phenomenological thought most fully, starting from a standpoint close to that of

Heidegger. His approach to the theory of perceptual intentionality includes the

important move of drawing attention to our primordial ‘perceptual faith’ in the being of

the world. Our embodiment is a membership of the world. This world in which we are

enmeshed is a world shot through with our own meanings and projects: it is our

lifeworld; flesh of our flesh.

So the history of classical phenomenology, then, has the intentional object as

transcendent but mine because the world is my lifeworld. So much is clear, but it is of

central importance for Henry, nevertheless, that this is not mineness in the sense of

carrying the flavour of auto-affectivity, the self-awareness of immanent ‘life’. This is

the sense in which we may agree with him that auto-affectivity is immanent (with no

‘external’ directionality) and intentionality is transcendent (directing us to a world,

albeit a lifeworld).

24 Husserl, Ideas 1, §36: 73, Husserl’s emphases.

25 J. J. Drummond and L. Embree, The Phenomenology of the Noema (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).

26 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill:Northwestern University Press, 1968)

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The third point of comparison between auto-affectivity and intentionality is based on

the two previous ones, which enable us to assert that immanent affectivity only has

reality for us if expressed in the light of intentional consciousness.28

If auto-affectivity is characterized by immanence, then it is a direct implication of

Henry’s radical phenomenology that adjustment is needed in the way the relationship

between the two modes of manifestation is characterized, for

… immanent life is ‘as if’ it were non-existent for us unless it receives the form of

representation.29 … there is no intentional access to a purely immanent reality.30

Seyler goes on to point out that the cultural concerns that Henry expresses in such

work as the accounts of Marx and ‘barbarism’ must be carried out through intentional

manifestation, and indeed, beyond that to discursive realms:

In addition to the need for a translation of affectivity into intentionality and language,

we are now faced with a diversity of possible decisions that depend not only on

affectivity but also on contingent historical and economic factors…31

To summarise our discussion of the duality thesis, we have affirmed the statements

that auto-affectivity is lived rather than known, that it is immanent in contrast to the

transcendence of the intentional object, and that affectivity has reality for us and has

cultural traction only if expressed in the lived world of intentional consciousness.

The importance of the affect thesis is indicated by the fact that the longest section of

The Essence of Manifestation by far is ‘… The original revelation as affectivity’, and

in that section is found the only capitalised sentence in the book: THAT WHICH IS FELT

WITHOUT THE INTERMEDIARY OF ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER IS IN ITS ESSENCE AFFECTIVITY.32 This

is surely an incomplete specification of the essence of the affects; they are not simply

non-sensory. However, Henry does later expand the meaning of ‘sense’ to exclude

any connection of the affects with ‘inner sense’ – effectively ensuring that affectivity is

entirely to be understood as unmediated, not transcendent; allowing the statement,

“Affectivity is the essence of ipseity.”33

Affectivity is the essence of auto-affection … it is the manner in which the essence

[i.e. roughly consciousness as such] receives itself, feels itself, in such a way that this

28 Seyler, “From Life to Existence,” 99.






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‘self-feeling’ as ‘self-feeling by self’, presupposed by the essence and constituting it,

discovers itself in it, in affectivity, as an effective self-feeling by self, namely, as

feeling.34

However, Henry continues by insisting we should not expect to see the full gamut of

emotions in auto-affectivity.35 Pathos or suffering is given as the foundational affect,

which is not characterizable more specifically.36 In fact, in contrast to the assumption

in phenomenology generally37 that emotional life is bound up with experiences,

pathos is independent of the events of the lifeworld or conscious reflection38, being

simply the tonus of self-awareness, the mineness of existence. The suffering ‘just is’.

Yet it is the ground of particular emotions and feelings, including the feeling tone of

thought.39

The importance of affectivity in this foundational mode of pathos or suffering, then, is

that it is the flavour or tonus of the mineness of consciousness, self-experiencing. It

is the enduring thread of life, awake or asleep. This basic feeling-tone that Henry

argues to be essential to all affectivity whatsoever,40 gives intentional consciousness

its essential concernful nature (though Henry does not invoke Heidegger41 on care

here):

Affectivity and affectivity alone permits sensibility to be what it is, an existence, the

thickness of a life gathered about itself and experiencing itself as affected, suffering

and supporting that which affects it, and not the cold grasp of the thing or its

indifferent contemplation.42

Interestingly, Henry finds that pathos, usually synonymous with suffering which

obviously in English has a negative connotation, is beyond positivity or negativity. He

notes that suffering and joy as specific emotions are quite distinct, but

34 Henry, Manifestation, 462, originally italicised.


36 James Williams, “Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental,” Sophia 47 (2012).

37 Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (New York: Anchor, 1977).

38 Hart, “Michel Henry’s Phenomenological Theology,” 198.

39 Michel Henry, “Phenomenology of Life,” in Veritas: Transcendence and Phenomenology, ed. Peter M. Candler, Jr., and Connor Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2007), 252, 253.

40 Henry, Manifestation, §53, 468.

41 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1972), §41.


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suffering and joy as well as their multiple modalizations are united in a more originary

identity, which is that of the co-constituent suffering and enjoy-ing of the essence of

life and its ipseity.43

The significance of affect for Henry’s project of a phenomenology of pre-reflective

life, aware of itself in its mineness, is clear. Pathos founds the way in which

experience matters to the living individual.

However, there are issues to be raised about suffering, pathos.

Firstly, in emphasising the undifferentiated nature of the affect of auto-affectivity,

Henry does not acknowledge the depth of the emotional life that finds the individual

personally implicated, caught up in the meanings of their lifeworld. Just as we found

hylē to be a simplistic portrayal of the underlying flow of the life of perception, pathos

fails to take account of each individual’s emotional life. In fact, Henry confuses

unconscious and preconscious functioning in both the realms of perception and

affect. As far as affect is concerned, we are profoundly fearful, irredeemably wishful,

unknowingly self-deceptive, prey to irresolvable inner conflict, and strongly

defensive.44 Does pathos escape this, even if we take it to be the ‘background hum’

of emotionality? Williams45 suggests not. Unless Eckhartian detachment could be

expected to reach such a constant null-point of affect, pathos is simply an analytical

fiction aimed at labelling in the abstract the affect of auto-affectivity.

Secondly, there are other candidates for the role of fundamental emotion. Within the

existentialist tradition, of course, anxiety in its somewhat distinctive modes in

Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and even R. D. Laing, is a significant contender.

These authors have the individual immersed in the lifeworld; basic emotionality

reflects being-in-the-world rather than immanent ‘life’. But Sartre separately suggests

a basic emotional tonus that is possibly akin to pathos:

So this is the Nausea: this blinding revelation? ... Now I know: I exist – the world

exists – and I know the world exists.46 (176)

In sum, the meaning of pathos as the affect of the manifestation of auto-affectivity is

a matter that requires some work beyond the further exegesis of Henry’s writings.

43 Henry, “Phenomenology of Life,” 255, 256.

44 For example, Roy Shafer, The Analytic Attitude (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1983).

45 Williams, “Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry.”

46 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

9

As important to Henry’s material phenomenology as the affect thesis is the selfhood

thesis. In summary, the thesis is that auto-affective life is immanently self-aware, in

contrast to the ‘transcendence of the ego’ of classical phenomenology. But there are

complications, and we will comment on three of them. These are: The distinction

between the nature of the self and the way the self appears in intentionality and in

auto-affectivity; the claim that the presence to self of consciousness in auto-affectivity

is anonymous, and the possibility of a mode of awareness which bridges the

immanence / transcendence difference: the ‘I-am-me’ experience.

It is plainly central to the rationale of material phenomenology that auto-affectivity is

immediately self-aware, an ‘appearing to itself of the appearing.’47 In this, it seems to

contrast with classical phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty states the situation of

selfhood as it appears in the phenomenology of intentionality: “There is no inner man,

man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself,”48 and, “Where in the

body are we to put the seer, since evidently there is in the body only ‘shadows

stuffed with organs’, that is, more of the visible.”49 Henry regarded it as a major

criticism of intentionality that the self is necessarily at a distance – an object for

consciousness – whereas it is intimately enveloped in the very meaning of immanent

auto-affection.

However, the difference between the two modes of manifestation may not be so

great as it seems in the case of selfhood. Let us take intentionality first, where

selfhood, in the sense of having describable characteristics, is an intentional object.

Sartre (for example) was somewhat jubilant in writing of the ‘expulsion’ of selfhood, in

this sense, from consciousness:

[There] is no longer an ‘inner life’... because there is no longer anything which is an

object and which can at the same time partake of the intimacy of consciousness.

Doubt, remorse, the so-called ‘mental crises of conscience’, etc. – in short, all the

content of intimate diaries - become sheer performance.50

However, classical phenomenology by no means denies the presence to itself of

consciousness. Sartre himself takes the view that pre-reflective self-awareness of

not being the object of intentionality is subjectivity.51 The non-thetic awareness of

itself of consciousness makes the distinction an imperative one, between being


48 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xi.

49 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible, 138.

50 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 93, 94.

51 Zahavi, “Subjectivity and Immanence.”

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consciousness of something and being in a state of knowing. But to come to a

knowing awareness of oneself always involves an act of reflection, and this entails

distance. (Of course, Sartre famously made much of the bad faith of identifying with

the object-self of conscious reflection – labelling such self-objectification ‘the spirit of

seriousness.’ He dubbed the achievement of self knowledge in reflection 'impure

reflection'. The self we construe in this way is not a discovery, but a decision - a

choice of self.)

Henry’s view is plainly opposed to Sartre’s. It is because transcendental life is

characterized by its absolute immanence that intentionality can never grasp it: “When

it is a question of the ipseity of the ego, intentionality always arrives late”52

Turning attention to Henry’s own view of the immediate manifestation of selfhood, it

is by no means clear that the self of auto-affectivity is any improvement on the non-

thetic awareness of itself of consciousness acknowledged by classical

phenomenology.53 The intimate, indeed inextricably unified, elements of immanence

do not seem to permit any form of selfhood that is personal. Here we surely have

precisely the same inchoate sense of one’s conscious existence as the presence to

self of consciousness which Sartre allows.

This brings us to the second line of inquiry regarding the selfhood thesis, which

precisely addresses the putative anonymity of the self-awareness of auto-affectivity.

Writing of the phenomenology of intentionality, Sartre, taking delight in opacity,

expressed the non-coincidence of self and consciousness in the sentence, “Human

reality, in its most immediate being … must be what it is not and not be what it is.”54

This is very much in line with a couplet of Angelus Silesius: “I know not who I am, /

But what I know, I’m not,” pointing up nicely the distinction between the self as object

of consciousness and the self-without-qualities, the auto-affectivity, that is the

anonymous self of material phenomenology.

Both Zahavi and Kelly conclude that this anonymity is a point of agreement between

Husserl and Henry: “The self manifests itself primordially in a state of anonymity”.55

But Henry himself seems sometimes to demur, though he doesn’t say why: “Husserl

52 Henry, Material Phenomenology, 122.

53 Michael Kelly, “Dispossession: On the Untenability of Michel Henry’s Theory of Self-Awareness,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35 (2004), 266.

54 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), 67.

55 Kelly, “Dispossession,” 276.

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could only describe as ‘anonymous’ that self which in the first instance is constitutive

of the way things appear.”56

Finally, in discussion of the selfhood thesis, we must mention a form of experience

that seems to entail intentionality in one’s reflection on pre-reflective consciousness

in a rather different manner than is usual when one takes the self as an intentional

object. Husserl himself had implicitly acknowledged this experience in saying, “I am

not only for myself [an intentional object like other phenomena] but I am me.”57 The ‘I-

am-me’ experience, documented by Herbert Spiegelberg, is described as

… a vertiginous feeling which is particularly acute in childhood but by no means

restricted to it. It differs significantly from the mere everyday awareness of selfhood or

individuality as signified by the use of the pronoun ‘I’. For the I-am-me experience

involves a peculiar centripetal movement not to be found in the simple statement ‘I

am’… 58

Spiegelberg gives a number of descriptions from novels and from biographies

(though the accounts in novels generally turn out to refer to personal reminiscences

of the authors) in which the child comes to a dawning awareness of their own

personhood in a vivid way. Not that there seems to be reference in these

experiences to any particular attributes. The awareness is almost abstract. It does

seem justifiable to conjecture that the focus of attention is anonymous conscious

selfhood, auto-affectivity, as such.

It seems appropriate to move from the sense of wonder experienced in the “I-am-me”

experience to a consideration of the divinization thesis, that individual life is

absolute Life, and that immanent anonymous consciousness is not “its own origin,”

but reveals, “the life that engenders itself in a continuous process of auto-affection.”59

Some commentators have suggested that this aspect of Henry’s thinking can be

detached from material phenomenology without damage.60 The structure of Henry’s

thought discussed through the other four theses is probably not hazarded by criticism

of its religious aspect. However, one major feature of the theological part of his work

does impinge importantly on the question of the relationship between the two modes

of manifestation – auto-affective life and intentionality – that we have considered in

56 Henry, “Phenomenology of Life,” 244, 245.

57 Quoted by Henry, “Phenomenology of Life,” 251.

58 Herbert Spiegelberg, “On the ‘I-am-me’ experience in childhood and adolescence.” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 4 (1964), 29.


60 Protevi, “Philosophies of Consciousness and the Body,” 75.

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this essay. This feature is to do with Henry’s antipathy to the phenomenology of

intentionality; his rejection of representation in favour of immanence.

Of course, this focus within divinization means we neglect a large number of other

significant issues (some interrelated): Henry’s apparent pantheism,61 or Gnosticism,62

and his rejection of the possession by human selfhood of the imago Dei,63 not to

mention the many lines of criticism which arise from his apparent treatment of sacred

writ as if a text of material phenomenology64 and the complimentary criticism of

Janicaud that his ersatz phenomenology is a cover for religious ideas.65 However, the

focus on the theological impact of Henry’s massive preference for auto-affectivity

tackles a very general problem with wide ramifications, and also will draw this essay

to an appropriate summarizing end.

In discussion of the duality thesis we concluded, regarding the relationship between

intentional and auto-affective manifestation, that, for any manifestation to be actual

for us it must reach representation. Intentionality is where the lived becomes known.

In the context of the discussion of the divine, then, the auto-affectivity of God, Life, if

lived through rather than known cannot influence my mundane thought and activity.

In this context, some deficiencies of Henry’s work on cultural themes become

obvious. We saw in discussing the duality thesis that Seyler concluded that the

cultural concerns of Henry needed to be followed through at least at the level of

intentionality. Thought and action in the world cannot be a matter of the pure material

phenomenology of life.

The accuracy of this opinion becomes clear if we consider Henry’s Barbarism.

In a chapter entitled, “The Sickness of Life” (which bears little relation to the

discussion of auto-affectivity, etc. earlier in the book) Henry decides that science’s

abstracting from the lifeworld is essentially a move of life itself:

61 Antonio Calcagno, “The Incarnation, Michel Henry, and the Possibility of an Husserlian-Inspired Transcendental Life,” Heythrop Journal XLV (2004).

62 Joseph M. Rivera, “Generation, Interiority and the Phenomenology of Christianity in Michel Henry,” Continental Philosophy Review 44 (2011), 223.

63 Rivera, “Phenomenology of Christianity,” 219.

64 Michel Henry, “Speech and Religion: The Word of God,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

65 Janicaud, Dominique, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate ed. Dominique Janicaud et al. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 73.

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Science does not simply abstract from the lifeworld and consequently from life itself.

This abstraction is the putting out of play of sensible qualities, and it is the constitutive

action of modern science in its initial and founding reasoning. This operation … is an

operation of absolute subjectivity, and in this way a mode of life. … 66

In other words, it seems that this culturally disastrous tendency is a direct product of

Life.

Such a distressing understanding of the cultural situation is comparable to

Heidegger’s decision that technical rationality67 (a diagnosis of modernity somewhat

parallel to ‘barbarism’) is a sending of Being.

Both thinkers highlight, albeit in their different ways, serious deficiencies in modern

culture. On the one hand to do with ideological repression of life; on the other hand a

historical enframing. Heidegger has a nihilistic account about the history of Being,

though maybe poetic thought may be the source of liberation. Henry, a Christian

thinker, has little extra to say. From the resources of material phenomenology alone it

is difficult to see what he could say.

In summary of this situation, and in summary of the essay as a whole, Henry can be

accorded significant praise for his solution to the problem of the foundation of

intentionality and for giving a basis for immediate self-awareness. His account of

auto-affectivity in its dimensions of hylē, affect, and selfhood can certainly be

developed positively. However, this is all in the context of the re-emphasis on a

symbiotic relationship with intentionality. As we see from the example of barbarism,

his phenomenology cannot get outside. Intentionality must be given its due in Henry’s

phenomenology.

Drawing the parallel between Eckhart’s thinking and that of Henry,68 it is right to

balance Henry’s immanentism with intentionality in line with the incomparable

Sermon 269 which urges not only virginity but also maternity:

If a man were to be ever virginal, he would bear no fruit. If he is to be fruitful he must

needs be a wife. … For a man to receive God within him is good, and in receiving he

is a virgin. But for God to be fruitful in him is better, for only the fruitfulness of the gift

66 Henry, Barbarism, 57.

67 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and other essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

68 Henry discusses the parallels between his thinking and Eckhart’s German Sermons at length in Manifestation, §§39, 40.

69 Maurice O’C. Walshe, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (New York: Crossroad, 2009), Sermon 8 (Deutschen Werke 2) 78 .

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is the thanks rendered for the gift, and herein the spirit is a wife, whose gratitude is

fecundity, bearing Jesus again in God’s paternal heart.

5,491 words

15

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What is Manifestation Woven on Warp and Weft the Cogency of Michel Henry's Response Auto-Affective...

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