What is manifestation woven on, warp and weft?

The cogency of Michel

Henrys 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 ...

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 Henrys 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 Henrys
claim for auto-affective life.
1. The foundation thesis in which hyletic (material) phenomenology, autoaffectivity, 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.

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. Grn, I. Damgaard, and S. Overgaard (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2007).
3

Henry, Manifestation, 380.

Frdric Seyler, From Life to Existence: A Reconsideration of the Question of

Intentionality in Michel Henrys Ethics, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 20
(2012). Seyler names these first two theses.

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 ego7 of intentionality).
5. The divinization thesis that auto-affectivity is rooted in absolute autoaffectivity, 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 Henrys core system.
We begin with Henrys 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

Henry, Manifestation, 462.

Henry, Manifestation, 466.

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

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

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.

Henry points to Husserls own (short and fragmented) discussion of hyl, 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. Hyl 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 nonintentional, 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 Henrys (and Husserls) account of hyl. 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 hyl 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 experience 14 [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.
15 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 4.
16 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 5.

Work within the psychology of perception has more than substantiated MerleauPontys criticism of the notion of hyl. 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 phenomenologys
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 hyl, then, indicative of a material phenomenology temporally prior to
intentionality seems unsupported. This seems to threaten one understanding of
Henrys 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 hyl 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 Henrys Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian
Reading of Cest moi, la vrit. Husserl Studies 15 (1999), 187.

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 ones

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 nonintentional, 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
21 Henry, Manifestation, 43.
22 Henry, Manifestation, 45 my bold emphasis; as usual Henry provides lavish italicisation.
23 Hart, Michel Henrys Phenomenological Theology, 194.

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, Husserls 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)

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
Henrys 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.

29 Seyler, From Life to Existence, 109.
30 Seyler, From Life to Existence, 110.
31 Seyler, From Life to Existence, 110.
32 Henry, Manifestation, 462.
33 Henry, Manifestation, 465.

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.

35 Henry, Manifestation, 465.
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 Henrys 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.
42 Henry, Manifestation, 481.

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 Henrys 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
hyl to be a simplistic portrayal of the underlying flow of the life of perception, pathos
fails to take account of each individuals 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 Henrys 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).

As important to Henrys 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
47 Henry, Manifestation, 234.
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.

10

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.)
Henrys view is plainly opposed to Sartres. 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 late52
Turning attention to Henrys 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 nonthetic 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 ones 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, Im 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 doesnt say why: Husserl

52 Henry, Material Phenomenology, 122.

53 Michael Kelly, Dispossession: On the Untenability of Michel Henrys Theory of SelfAwareness, 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.

11

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 ones 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 Iam-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 Henrys thinking can be
detached from material phenomenology without damage.60 The structure of Henrys
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.
59 Seyler, From Life to Existence, 101.
60 Protevi, Philosophies of Consciousness and the Body, 75.

12

this essay. This feature is to do with Henrys 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): Henrys 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 Henrys 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 Henrys 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 Henrys 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 sciences
abstracting from the lifeworld is essentially a move of life itself:

61 Antonio Calcagno, The Incarnation, Michel Henry, and the Possibility of an HusserlianInspired 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.

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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
Heideggers 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 hyl, 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 Henrys
phenomenology.
Drawing the parallel between Eckharts thinking and that of Henry,68 it is right to
balance Henrys 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 Eckharts German Sermons at
length in Manifestation, 39, 40.
69 Maurice OC. 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 Gods paternal heart.

5,491 words

15

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