Henry C'est moi la vertité

8/2/2019 Henry C'est moi la vertit

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the life of the mind succumb to an inherent temptation to understandconsciousness and phenomenality in terms of reference, transcendence, ecstasis,exteriority, intentionality, etc., i.e., in terms of consciousness directednessbeyond itself to what is other than itself. As a result, when these thinkers turnthe phenomenological gaze to pre-reflective awareness the result is that it isaccounted for in terms of the properties of this intentional gaze. This is to saythat the essence of phenomenality is accounted for in terms of transcendenceor intentionalitys power to disclose, articulate, and make present being. Thus,e.g., Henry sees Husserl wanting to maintain that because the primal presencingitself is not now it is only self-present through its ecstasis in retention and inwhat it makes present in its vertical intentionality, i.e., the stream of acts andsensa.3

Thus what is missing even in phenomenological philosophy is a failure tosee that transcendence or intentionality is not the primary consideration for thefundamental issue of what appearing is. The pervasive monist propensity hidesthe basic issue of the essence of phenomenality. The essence of manifestation,Henry argues with an inexhaustible finesse, is self-manifestation. There is nodisclosure of something, no genitive of manifestation, unless there is a dativeof manifestation which itself is uniquely self-present, i.e. here at this dativethere is no genitive of manifestation for a dative of manifestation, no appearingof . . . to---.4 Not only is there no disclosure of the world unless I am self-conscious in a way which is essentially different from the worlds disclosure,but there is no epistemic, emotive, or volitional achievement unless I am aware

of it. If I know, then, in a sense which is the key to Henryian thought, I knowthat I know; if I will then in some special way I know that I will. If I dontknow that I know or know that I will, there is neither knowing nor willing,neither known nor willed.

If we think, along with Husserl, of truth as the filling intention of what wasmeant in its absence (what was proposed by a proposition) as it was meantin its absence, then we link truth exclusively to the world, to intentionality andto reference. Yet there is no intending or referring whether emptily or fullywithout the original self-manifestation. For Henry this original disclosure, asthe condition for all disclosure, is entitled also to the honorific term of truth.

Another more Heideggerian way of expressing the monist prejudice is to

say that intentionality is what enables something to be out of itself in the senseof not existing merely in itself but being something over-against and appearingto someone. When we insert individual acts in the thickness of the totalintentionality of world we are moved to see that somethings disclosure,the appearing of something (genitive of manifestation), is as a result of worldsletting appear or worlds letting something come outside of itself into the openand thereby manifest to a wakeful mind (a dative of manifestation). Here it isthe world that enables something to appear as being outside, before us in theopen; this is appearing within the truth of the world. For Henry, world as the


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self-exteriorization of the exteriority of `the outside, has perfect symmetrywith temporal exstases (27; cf. also 199 ff.). In both cases of world andtemporality, things, in their coming to appearing as coming into the world, arerobbed of their inherent reality because the appearance is something foreign tothem and in juxtaposition to their reality. In temporality things are slung outsideof themselves in the extases of past and future so that the being, i.e., presentbeing, exists only in its emptying self-exteriorization; there is no present, onlythe extases of past and future, retention and protention.

The monist view that things come most properly to manifestation in thecoming outside and being appearings of . . . to--- results in the incessantannihilation of things: on the one hand, through the ecstases depriving them ofany actuality and, on the other hand, through the worlds enabling themanifestation of things to be their self-exteriorization.

I do not think this latter critical position is necessary to Henrys basic position.According to Henry, intentionality and/or world require the loss of the actualityof things because things are substituted for by a representation of them, i.e., intheir appearings. Appearings thus become intervening kinds of either mentalentities or ontological anomalies. In fact, Henry occasionally so formulates hiscritique of the basic monist position that he appears to hold that the basictranscendental phenomenological position that being and manifesation areinseparable applies only to self-affections and to deny that it holds of the beingof the world. Yet one can argue both that appearings are inseparable fromthings because they are the articulations of things and not some version of

Scholastic species or Fregean senses and that this sense of manifestation,which is proper to that of the world and intentionality, is less basic and essentiallydifferent from the sense of manifestation of original non-reflexive self-consciousness. We can honor the distinction between appearings, manifestation,and what appears, as well as the claim that in the case of original self-manifestation this distinction does not obtain, without thereby transformingappearings into mere representations extrinsic to the being.5

For Henry, the original manifestation non-reflexive awareness is clearlyof a completely different order than that of intentionality and/or world. As helater put it, the truth of the world is of a completely different order than thetruth of life. Indeed, as we shall see, the truth of Christianity is of a completely

different order than the truth of the world because its truth is the truth of life.Here we have something manifest not through an appearing or (worlds) letting-appear which is outside and different from the actual thing or reality; rather wehave a self-appearing in which what appears, its appearings and its act ofmanifestation are all one; there is no outside, no referring, no distance. Myself-experiencing of my life in the first-person, e.g., in the flow of affections,sensa, acts, etc., permits no distinction between what appears and its appearings.In this feeling/sensing there is no distance between what appears and that towhich it appears and the appearing; they are all one.


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A basic point is the passive genesis of the self-affectings. One, as it were,receives oneself through a donation which is an ongoing self-experiencing andself-manifestatation, a self-suffering and joy. This means that this self-awareand self-manifest self-ness or ipseity, as a receiving oneself, is a self-affection,an auto-affection, which is prior to and a condition for any hetero-affectionas an impression coming from outside or transcendent to consciousness. Withoutthis archaic passivity and self-affection or sensibility there could not be anyobject be it ever so humble as a mere impression, sensum, stimulus, hyle, etc.Here that which affects and that which is affected are the same and thereforethere is nothing exterior or foreign to me in this self-affecting. It is the selfwhich itself constitutes the content of its self-affection (see, e.g., 134).

The self-affecting therefore must not be understood as something whichbrings about consciousness, as if there were not selfness and consciousnessuntil the self affected itself and consciousness emerged out of an unconsciousaffect affecting another unconscious affect and this brought about consciousness.No. For Henry, self-affection is a paradoxical term in as much as the self-affecting is already itself self-affected, already conscious, and what it affects isitself, is itself already conscious.

Although, one sometimes gets the opposite impression in the course ofHenrys analyses, it must be said that the unique and problematic completenessand absoluteness of immanence are not to be envisaged as existingindependently of transcendence. For Henry transcendence is also a basic modein which being reveals itself7 and subjectivity of course always has a life in

the presence of transcendent being.8 The absolute life of immanence is always,but not merely the immanent, non-ecstatic self-revelation of the very act oftranscendence.9 For Henry pure phenomenality has the structure anddivision according to the co-original dimensions of representation [intentionality/reference] and life.10

For Henry, as we have noted, the analysis of the original self-manifestationrequires that life becomes the ultimate category. The proper sense of life isnot to be found in anyDaseinsanalyse. Henry echoes a critique of Heideggerwe find already in Sartre and heard in Germany today from Manfred Frank.According to Heidegger, only because the human asDasein stands in a relationto the world and is defined through this relation is he related to himself and

thereby has access to life. In such a view the living being is living by having aworld and this relation is what mediates its relation to itself, its self-living. ForHenry such a view is a fundamental theoretical murder of life. It robs us of ourfirst-person immediate experience of life.

On the other hand, what a regional ontology (such as that of Aristotle,Driesch, Husserl, Conrad-Martius, Scheler and Plessner) uncovers is the vitalityof what lives not the lived living itself, not the Erleben. Of course, it maygrasp as characteristic of bodies we experience the essential meaning of thesebodies in terms of a self-relating, self-maintaining, self-moving, and self-


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reproducing. But this feature of life for the observer, this essential meaning, isan empty intention; there is no intuitive filled intention to which the meaningcorresponds (53 ff.). For Henry, grasping in the second- or third-person theoriginal essential meaning of life, ofvie/Leben (qua lpreuve de soi/Erleben),is by stipulation ruled out because vie/Leben is ruled to apply only to theexperience in the first person of the stream of self-affections, presencings,etc.;Leben is confined toErleben in the first-person. The second- and third-person empathic experiences (HusserlsEinfhlung) always come up with anessential absence and emptiness; and they never could give me life unless Ias living were already somehow connected with the others in a more basicapriori way than empathy. Therefore Husserls account, because the other isalways transcendent and outside, never is an account of how we truly knowthe other, understood as self-experiencing. (Thus it would seem, oddly enough,a scandal for Henry that knowing the other is not knowing him/her in the first-person; for Henry knowing the other is knowing him/her not in the second- orthird-person but in the first-person! For this reader, the sense of alterity withinthe first-person, although basic to Henrys theological as well as socialphenomenology, is difficult to sort out.) For Henry, we are with one another ina more basic way in our first-person experience than through the perception ofbodies out there in the world that motivate a pairing so that over there wehave an analogy with our first-person self-experience here now. Indeed,there are original pathic forms of being-with, forms of community, which,as a spiritual acoustic, are the condition for the community-formation of

which Husserl writes. Not least of these are the ways of being with the dead,with God, with Christ; but also the way mothers are with their children,hypnotists with their subjects, and lovers with their beloveds.11 This positionis stated in Cest moi, la vritthis way:

Life does not found merely each of the terms between which the relation tothe other is established. It founds the relation itself . . . . How does Lifefound this possibility for each of the Sons being with the other, their being-in-common? In so far as it itself is this being-in-common. (317)

I will pass over this last theme of intersubjectivity because I believe it is not yetdeveloped; clearly the theological transcendence in immanence, to which wewill soon turn, provides a sense of otherness, or at least of depth, within thefirst-person; but for this reader the view that knowledge of the other as anotherI requires a knowledge of him/her in the first person is a stumbling block.

But related is the discussion of how we know what is alive. What I miss inHenrys discussion is room for the category of soul or entelechy which accountsfor how the I-can is inseparably connected to an It-can which may become It-must and therefore I-cannot, i.e., for the various unconscious functionings ofwhat we call life outside of and within the human body; it is also a powerfulconcept for elucidating the phenomenon of teleology, whether it is manifest in


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various forms of development evident in third-person considerations or in thefirst-person experiences of infinite ideas as well as of the ubiquitous interplayof filled and empty intentions.12 In the case of an organism, whether onesown or that of another, may we not say that it has a future, a present and apast in the sense that its teleological nature requires that in its present actualitythere is an actual fulfillment of its former future as well as a present retentionof the achievements of its former presents and an anticipation of its future?And yet here there is no manifest reason to posit anErleben in the organismitself. The stimulus that the plant receives and responds to, e.g., in heliotropism,is not manifestly felt, not a self-affection; there seems to be no phenomenologicalbasis provided by the plant for the empathic positing of the immanence of self-affection. Yet there is a kind of self-relation because the plant itself moves,holds sway over, and reproduces itself. That is, it is not as if the parts of theplant, i.e., the cells, genes, molecules, all do their work independently of oneanother and miraculously there results the whole any more than the lumber,mortar, cement, nails, screws, pipes, wires, etc. would all do their work andthereby a house would result.

The elimination of the category of soul or entelechy creates a vacuum forreductionist mechanism. Or it compels Henry to affirm panpsychism (in thesense of where there is life in the common sense there isErleben, a speculationwhich would seem quite foreign to Henrys strict phenomenological philosophy;or do we have the spiritual acoustic also with plants and organisms?). Orfinally it consigns the realm of the organic to the non-living something that

seems uncalled for and to come near the reductionism he rightfully criticizes.13Various phenomenological thinkers (Scheler, Conrad-Martius, and Plessner)would argue that in Erleben there is an essential fulfillment of the definingfeatures, e.g., self-relating, self-referring, self-identifying, etc. already hintedat but not actualized in the realm of the mere organic life because the self-referring is still without a proper self. This would seem to be congenial withHenrys basic claims. Life is already analogical for Henry and it would notharm his position to erase the seemingly univocal claim; we will see that thedivine life and its generation of the First-Born, Primal Son, is not in everyrespect identical with that of the transcendental Is to which they give birth.

Thus for Henry a fortiori the proper sense of life is not to be found in

biology which seems perfectly willing to acknowledge that for it the verynotion of life, as something distinctive from the physics and chemistry towhich it is reduced, is without any scientific or pragmatic merit (51-53). Ratherthe reality of life is to be found in what is most essential for phenomenology,i.e., that without which there would be no manifestations of . . . to---. ForHenry, life is exemplarily non-reflexive lived experience, le vcu, orErleben,and this is the deepest sense of being or to be (Sein).

Modernity is able to be characterized as blind to life. The Galilean reductionof life to what is dead, to what is essentially worldly, but worldly as what is to


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be quantified and controlled, is a pervasive illness, a madness, whose barbarismfor Henry is of apocalyptic proportions. Technology, capitalist economy, SovietMarxism, TV, the modern sense of work and labor, etc. all form ingredients ofthis lifeless megamachine (Lewis Mumfords, not Henrys term) which ishell-bent on the destruction of all life and humanity and denying the immanentlife-force which creates it.14

3. The Essence and the Foundations of the Philosophy of Religion

We may now turn to the themes of philosophy and phenomenology of religionas well as philosophical theology. There are several but intertwined procedures

here: Henry finds it obligatory to interpret the themes of religion (a term whichhe rarely uses) only in terms of his interpretation of Christianity, even thoughhe admits that the radical power we have to self-affect and exist as selves isnot in our power (the major theme of this essay), but rather

religions are the different ways of expressing this non-power which isinscribed in the passivity of my life . . . Living life as something that onehas received is necessarily to experience an infinite respect in regard tooneself and in regard to something which is more than oneself. This isalready religion.15

In the book we are studying he interprets Christianity within the context of

his radical life-phenomenology. And he finds it singularly appropriate,although the reasons for this appropriateness are not always clear to this reader,to interpret or explicate radical life-phenomenology in terms of Christianity,foremost the Gospel of John. The reader at first might well think this to berather illiberal; but my sense of the matter is that the patient student will berewarded with not only a sumptuous feast of radical life-phenomenology, buta novel if also ancient appreciation of Christianity. Doubtless other religioustraditions might be drawn into the conversation eventually; but to do so at thestart is not necessary. It would be odd to fault a religious person, even a religiousthinker, for having a specific religious tradition. Henrys theology may becontrasted with modern liberal theologies that aspire to speak from any and all

perspectives; it may also be constrasted with the post-modern ones claiming thatwe cannot surmount our contingent perspectives but must continue to talkwith the others even though in our hearts we know there is nothing to say.

The non-reflexive self-manifesting realm of immanence or life has bestowedon it early the title of the essence and the absolute. In the 1963 work, The

Essence of Manifestation, the essence refers to the realm of immanent self-manifestation, presumably in part because it does what Wesen did for bothHusserl and Heidegger: It heralded the necessity and invariant which philosophymust uncover; it also singled out the unique kind of manifestation of the


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condition for the possibility of all manifestation. Similarly the absolute hadits remote precedent in earlier idealist thinkers but perhaps foremost in Husserlsabsolute being of the realm of immanence.

The unique manifestation of the essence which, because of the pre-dominant standpoint of intentionality may be regarded as invisible or hidden,enables Henry to broach religious themes. In 1963 we find:

immanence constitutes the most interior nature of the absolute, the absoluteitself, its essence. This is why the absolute permits itself to be understoodby starting from this hidden state or as that which maintains itself in thisstate; this is why No one has seen God, and finally why God is thehidden God.16

The initial reaction to this might well be that this is a very narrow place inwhich to do philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. For Henry this isthe monist prejudice kicking in. Philosophy has long sought theparousia, theadvent of the full presence of being, in ontology or in the true knowledge ofbeing as such or the To Be of beings. It has done this through allegiance torepresentation or intentionality and failed to see that the self-appearance of theappearing and the self-manifestation of pure manifestation do not occur thisway. Further, Henry believes that intentionality, knowledge, and the truth ofthe world are in principle not only inadequate but inappropriate for the truth ofthe divine which is the truth of life.

The Parousia is not the fact of true knowledge; it is its presupposition, justas it is the presupposition of the non-true knowledge of natural consciousnesswhich limits itself to a being. Because the presupposition of the true knowlegeof philosophical consciousness and of the non-true knowledge of naturalconsciousness is the Parousia, this presupposition is not a foundation hiddenbehind the life of consciousness, it is conscious life itself as such. . .17

This reader has difficulty with Henrys claim that the original self-manifestationof ourselves to ourselves is a Parousia. The term typically means the fullness,the completion. Its sense is necessarily one that stands in contrast to what isempty and what is incomplete. It is a basic point of Henry that the endpointand fullness for which knowledge, and ultimately philosophy, yearn is the

essence or original self-manifestation of life. But that fullness involvescontrasting it first with the sense of its emptiness with regard to intentionalityand the worldly sense of fullness/emptiness as well as the transformation ofthe world into a relative emptiness. But it is only with the erasure of the sensesof fullness and emptiness as they unfold in intentionality that we can get asense of the essence. But what does Parousia now mean? Is it just as muchemptiness (cf. sunyata) asparousia?

Henrys early use of being clearly does not place him in the camp of theonto-theology critiqued by Heidegger and many others following in the wake


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of Heidegger. Rather, Henry has proposed a phenomeno-theology or a theo-phenomenology. The true ontological structure is the attending to Beingwhich is not an act of referring or intending; it is the original self-manifestationof Being which constitutes the essence of consciousness or lifes orginal self-affecting.18 But this early appropriation of the received concept of Beingeventually is supplanted by Life or the truth of Life, Henrys preferred wayof talking about the non-reflective immanent self-awareness. HeideggersSeinis an absurd subordination of the truth of Life to that of the world. Jean-LucMarion is praised by Henry for his critique of Heidegger and striving to pointto God without Being. (198) Thus the hiddenness of the absolute and of lifeis the context for talking about God. Why is this not a capricious restraint inthe way Sein is? Because the manifestation ofSein is not as fundamental asthe essence; the latter is the absolute condition for all manifestation.

But attached to this is a more basic consideration. The absolute essentialrealm, The Truth of Life, is not merely that which accomplishes all revelation,but in it it itself is revealed. Recall that for Henry the basic or primal manifestationis the self-affecting. Here the achievement, the sensed or affected and thesensing or affecting are all one. If we take this to be the basic structure oflife we can say that life accomplishes a self-revelation, not a revealing inwhich the revealing is different from what is revealed and the manifestation isdifferent from the manifested. In contrast, the revelation proper to the light ofbeing and the world is a revelation from outside of something different fromitself. (World, the Clearing, are different from that which they permit to appear;

appearings are appearings of . . . to---; there is a distance between what appearsand its appearings and that dative to which the appearings appear, [even if wedo not hold with Henry that this is necessarily a destructive distance.])

For Henry, the divine, especially the God of Christianity who is revealed asLife Itself, must be the self-revealing. Why? Because anything else would benot only inadequate but inappropriate. It would be inadequate because thiswould mean that the divine would be mundane and an object of intentionalityand available only through interpretive apprehension. It would be inappropriatebecause the divine would be essentially vulnerable to the destruction of beingwhich characterizes the worldly manifestation wherein what reveals is not onlyseparate from what is revealed and that dative of manifestation for which the

revelation occurs, but also alienates what is revealed from itself and scatters it intemporality. Onto-theology is thus the murder of God. Therefore the divine,God, cannot be revealed through thinking or worldly experience which is alwaysa revealing in which what is made manifest is different from the manifestationor what enables the manifestation or that to which the manifestation is made.

Access to God understood as his self-revelation according to a pheno-menality proper to him is only suceptible of being produced there wherethis self-revelation happens and in the manner in which it does it. (39)


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Thus because God is uniquely self-revealing God can only be manifest, bephenomenalized, in the phenomenalizing which is proper to him which is thephenomenalizing of the basic condition for any phenomenality whatsoever.Because only in life is there this phenomenalizing of phenomenality, God cannotbe found in thinking or research. Rather God an only be found in that form ofmanifestation which is other than the realm of intentional or worldy disclosure,i.e., only the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality, which is theequivalent for Henry of non-reflexive self-awareness in life.19 And here Henryclaims another equivalence, aspects of which we will come to know betterlater: wherever there is life there is the divine self-manifestation. Because Godis life, we know God not in the knowledge of the world or on the basis of someform of knowledge, but only in life. (We will henceforth capitalize Life whenwe use it as the equivalent of the divine or God; but because of the thin lineseparating life and Life, I beg the readers indulgence at borderline cases.)

Thus Henry maintains that the theological concept of revelation isessentially phenomenological. There is total symmetry if not identity betweenthe phenomenological problematic of pure appearing, manifestation, etc. andChristianity.

With the idea of a pure revelation of a revelation whose phenomenality isthe phenomenalizing of phenomenality itself; of a absolute self-revelationthat does without anything which would be different from its ownphenomenological substance we are in the presence of that essence whichChristianity places in the principle of all things. God is this pure revelationwho reveals nothing other than himself. God reveals himself. (3637)

Thus a revelation of God to humans cannot consist in the disclosure of somehidden content which would be foreign to the inner essence of humans and yetsomehow transmitted to certain initiates. Similarly God is not something onesees in the world or confronts as an object over-against within the horizon ofthe world. Henry can enlist Johannine texts: I am not of this world (John 17:14); My Kingdom is not of this world (John 18: 36). This is in part becauserevelation (and the essence of phenomenology) has to do with the phenomenalityof phenomena, i.e., it has to do not with the things that are manifest but howthings are given to us. The understanding of revelation as knowledge of the

scriptures, or what the tradition passes down, and especially the scholarlyunderstanding of the scriptures and tradition according to the latest theory,information, discovery, etc. is folly. This kind of knowledge, whether rootedin the truth of history or the truth of the world or of Being, is always tentative,revisable, corrigible, falsifiable. But the absolute truth of God is the Truth ofLife. There is no scriptural text or interpretation, perhaps not even a dogma,that can promote this Truth of Life (17).20 I praise you, Father . . ., becauseyou have hidden all this from the wise and clever and revealed it to the littleones (Matthew 11: 25); i.e., the pre-condition as well as the effect of revelation


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is ones immediate awareness of oneself which permits itself to be explicatedas awareness of ones being a child of God. (See section 7. below.)

4. Theology, Intentionality, and Faith

This reader has difficulty resolving what seems to be a basic tension in someof Henrys formulations: Because intentionality does not grasp the essenceHenry requires that immanence be full-blown intelligibility apart from theexplicating intentional acts;and: the rich intelligibility of immanence is broughtto light through the explicating intentional acts. Henry argues eloquently forthe non-intentional, non-referential, non-reflexive form of manifestation and

shows how this is more fundamental and the condition for the possibility ofintentionality and the truth of the world. But at the same time the manifestnature of this realm is nothing without the intentional activity of reflection.Indeed it is not only essentially hidden and invisible but has remained anonymousfor philosophy for most of its history. If the original self-manifestation is afullness apart from and foreign to meaning, reference and intentionality, howis it that its disclosure requires reflection (i.e., intentionality and reference)?

Once again: Henrys distinction between knowledge through intentionalityand knowledge through auto-affection (the knowledge of life) is magnificentltyorchestrated. But are the latters features, e.g., as indubitable, as pathos, asself-affection, as a transcendental affectivity totally different from seeing, as

immediately self-revealing without distance, as invisibility, etc. evidentas suchapart from a phenomenological reflection (intentionality)?Another way to put this is in more scholastic (Lonerganian) language. We

can take from Henry the notion that original self-awareness is a self-affection,or as Husserl himself has put it, a primal sensing or feeling.21 In which case inour self-affecting each self and its acts are known prior to reflection subratione experti aut affectionis or under the formal aspect of the non-intentionally immediately experienced or self-affected. In order that ourexperience, self-affections, acts, evaluations, etc. be evident as such, theymust be known sub ratione quidditatis, i.e., by meaning-making acts or

Auffassungen which enable them to appear as such, i.e., as self-affections,acts, evaluations, etc. Prior to meaning-bestowing acts consciousness as theimmediate primal sensing or self-affecting is knowledge not of the objectbut of the subject and its acts. And these are present not as a terminus adquem but as aprincipium a quo; but even this immediate self-experiencing isnot knowledge of theseas such but merely self-affecting, i.e., self-experiencingsub ratione experti/affectionis awaiting reflective acts in order to becomemanifest as such, i.e., sub ratione quidditatis, or as informed with eid.22

In Phnomnologie matrielle, Henry seems to reject the Husserlianresolution that claims that there is an original reflective non-constituting (in


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the worldly sense)23

intuition or Schauen of the eidos/eidimmanent withinthe transcendental immanence which discloses itself in reflection as whatbefore was given (sub ratione experti sed non quidditatis) in a self-affectionor sensing prior to reflection. This is obviously not a strict identity relationshipand there is only a looser sameness-recognition between the non-reflectiveand reflective. Further it ought not be compared to the horizonally determinablethat becomes determinate (something Husserl himself occasionally does byway of analogy as in Hua III, 45); immediate self-awareness is not strictlyspeaking a horizonal knowing which is essentially intentional. Nor is it like anovel categorial intuition for such too is intentional and has to do with genuinebeginnings, whereas immediate self-awareness has to do with the ineliminablebut not articulated self-knowing which never is not there.

If this position is not acceptable this reader fails to see what the source ofHenrys descriptions and analyses is.

Similarly in the theological discussions, on the one hand, Henry maintainsthat the ineluctable presupposition for understanding Christianitys teaching isits interpretation of life as essentially phenomenological. And he speaks ofhow, for the one who penetrates into the inner essence of life, the inner contentof Christianity is able to illuminate with an overwhelming power (71). We thussee that the intentional life of the mind is a necessary condition for Christianityshedding light on life and it is a necessary condition as well for shedding lighton the essence of life and on Christianitys superior grasping of this essence.(In passing, we may note that there is interpretation involved in Henrys

renditions of both historical Christianity as well as The New Testament.)On the other hand, intentionality and the truth of the world are said to be

foreign to the truth and essence of life. (See 71.) The truth of Life isautonomously realized by Life being lived.

Thus we have: Christianity and philosophy must use intentionality to interpretlife; but life is theparousia apart from any interpretation or intentional activity;indeed these are foreign to it.

There is another basic issue here. The status of faith in Henry is not perfectlyclear to this reader. Faith in the early Christian tradition was said to be thesubstance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Its sense in thisancient definition is essentially tied to what in Henrys sense is worldly in so

far as it is tied to empty intentions. But in another sense it is non-worldy in asmuch as faith is a complex sui generis way of filling an intention transcendingthe phenomenological sense of world without at the same time having thefilling intuitions which comprise a robust sense of knowing.24 Thus there wouldseem to be a tension betweenpistis or faith and gnosis or the knowing occurringin the living of life. If we take Gnosis to be a passively received non-rational,non-worldy, revelatory self-knowledge inseparable from the knowledge of God,it would seem that Henrys theology would lean more to gnosis thanpistis.25

We shall elaborate on this.


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When Henry discusses faith within the context of his phenomenology ofChrist and Christianity there is clearly a tension with the traditional sense offaith as an intentionality which makes present by hope and trust what isepistemically not present or evident. On Henryian principles this is anintentionality which expects that which is absent to one day come to lightwithin the ecstatic intention of the world or being. But true (Henryian) faith isa mode of disclosure which is more radically opposed to seeing than is thetraditional understanding. It is not some lesser form of knowing, not a substitutefor seeing which remains absent, not an empty intention, as an expectation,incapable of itself to produce its content. Faith, according to Henry, doesnot belong to the domain of acts of consciousness but to self-affection orpathos, i.e., the living beings awareness that it has not itself given life to itself,i.e., awareness that it is not in its power to make itself a self, but rather that itis incessantly receiving itself and this power; this, according to the Henryianinterpretation of Christianity, is the disclosure of divine Sonship. (See ourdiscussion in section 7. below.) Thus we see that grace and not humanworks is the most fundamental feature of the human condition (242243).26

And we also see that this faith is not an empty intention but rather a fullness,indeed it is the steeped in theparousia of the absolute Lifes own certainty ofliving absolutely. (For faith see 108 ff., 195, 232 ff.; we shall later return tothe question of how suffering and pain in the pathos of life is still aparousia.)

Thus the life of faith is the faith of life or the fundamental self-affecting(which might also be named a proto-doxa or a transcendental trust)27 which

founds everything else that comes to light, not merely as a basic stratum but asthe very essence of manifestation. But for this reader, when Henry thenstates that faith is the revelation of the condition of divine Sonship,28 ofthe living beings being grasped in Lifes self-embrace (243), it remains unclearwhether this faith emerges out of a phenomenological analysis or whether thisanalysis itself is a grace.

5. God and the Teleology of the Mind

But what of another connected objection that a Husserlian must raise? It

would seem that theology of a phenomenological sort cannot dispense withthe minds worldliness. This is not only because of its view that being andmanifestation are inseparable and that the appearings of things are not distortingintervening entities but the very manifestations of things; nor is it only becauseof its view that the parousia is not to be realized apart from the pursuit ofinfinite tasks; but furthermore, and inseparable from this latter consideration,also by reason of its teleology and the pervasive power of regulative ideals.Chief among these is the intention of the ideal of world. This world-transcendingintending is the very condition of the intentionality of world and the things


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within world. These intendings get articulated by such Husserlian considerationsas the lure of the transcendence surpassing the transcendence of the world,i.e., the ideal-pole of the world, and the dynamism of the minds infinite desireto know, etc.

In short, for the Husserlian, because the mind is pervaded by an eros forthe divine, a sense of the divine which is bereft of every sense of the Gooderases a basic phenomenological sense of the divine. Consider that the senseof Marions critique of God, where the word God is crossed out, does notmean that the concept of God must disappear but rather that the divine entersinto the field of our thought only by rendering itself unthinkable there byexcess, by saturating thought each time and forever in such a way that thoughtis obliged to critique itself.29 It would seem that this is still, in spite of thecritique of Heideggers Sein as the necessary framework for any sense ofGod, still, a kind of (Platonic, Blondelian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian)ecstatic intentionality, as the condition, indeed, the very essence of the critiqueof idolatry. This is especially true if the critique is to have somephenomenological sense, and not be merely the critique of an idea of Godfrom the standpoint of an abstract, empty Unthinkable garnished from atradition.

The traditional and/or the Thomist-Blondelian-Husserlian-Heideggerianremoval of the divine from any form of thingliness and or being-ness is notdecisive for Henry because of its allegiance to transcendence and intentionality.And he does not attempt to see the question of transcendence in a doctrinal

context with which he himselfceteris paribus sides, i.e., the Thomist claimsthat after creation there are more entia but there is not more esse, and thatGod plus the world is not greater than God alone.30 Rather all such discussions,in so far as they seek the divine within ecstatic intentionality, become basicallyirrelevant for what is essential. Indeed, in Henry the very sense of idolatryswitches from the collapsing of the divine into a being or inflating a being tothe divine to a tension between the world and transcendental life. Morefundamental and seemingly more perverse than the dialectical way the idolabsorbs and displaces the excess of intentionality directed toward the divine isthe way the manifestness of the world and intentionality occlude themanifestness of life. For theology this occlusion is of consequence only in so

far as the truth of life is the truth of God. For Henry this equivalence cannotbe established by the intentionality of the Good because such is essentiallyheterogeneous to theparousia of life as original self-manifestation.

The problem posed by the teleology of consciousness is related to Henrysview of how will is subordinate to self-affection. And this is related to anothercase for theparousia which Henry builds: Self-affection, at bottom, is a kindof joy, and thus a parousia; it is the joy of sharing in the eternal Sonship. Letus briefly examine his case.In suffering ones selfness, indeed in this undergoingoneself as oneself, there is constituted what Henry calls ipseity, i.e., oneself


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is given to oneself. This becoming of ipseity, the shining forth of self-presence,is the triumph of life and self-revelation. Therefore not only is life or the selfsactualization a suffering but it is also joy. This basic sense of Being or Lifeis the unity of suffering and joy. These are not to be understood as two pre-existing separate tonalities but the intrinsic moments of self-manifestation. Andall possible tonalities, all affective determinations, are themselves modes ofthese constitutive moments of suffering and joy.31

When Henry claims that this ongoing undergoing or suffering of oneself isnot utterly without an affective tonality he is not simply referring to

Befindlichkeit, i.e., how we always already find ourselves in the world. Whathe has in mind is neither a being in the world nor a finding oneself; it is ratherthe living of auto-affection, its ongoing self-affection. If affectivity and emotionsare to be understood as necessarily involving implicit propositions about ourbeing-in-the-world then we can readily see that for Henry the tonality of auto-affection is prior to our ecstatic, interpretive, pre-propositional being-in-the-world. There is no exteriority, no outside, no world in the pure auto-affection.Further, Henry insists it is essentially non-relational or irrelational; yet in theearly work as well as in the later be believes he uncovers within Being/Life areason to still speak of a relation.32 (We shall have occasion to return to this.)

Henrys point here is a departure from other phenomenological axiologicaltheories. He (implicitly) rejects an axiology (such as Husserls standard earlyview) which holds that our affective life is founded on our worldly perception.33

Furthermore, feelings, which he names phenomenalizations of the original

self-affectings,34 are notto be explained as a result of the transcendent noemaor that which is revealed through the feelings, e.g., hate as a result of thequasi-causal or motivational force of the hateful object. Feelings, furthermore,differ in themselves before differing from the objects to which they refer. It isby itself that the feeling is affected in its affectivity in what makes it a feeling;it is itself which it reveals, itself and nothing else.35 Thus the tonalities of theoriginal self-affectings, the tonalities of the moments of suffering and joy aswell as the derived tonalities, are not to be understood as tied necessarily tothe world and the objects in the world.

Is Henry denying anything like the implicit propositional (Husserl: position-taking) character of our affective life? Is he denying anything likeBefindlichkeit,

i.e., that there are affective tonalities inseparably tied up to the world and whatis therein revealed? Even if we grant the difficult claim that there are deep-stratum tonalities which have to do with the attainment of, and flight from, lifeand selfness (themes stressed also in the works on barbarism and psychoanalysis),in general it would seem that the tonalities of auto-affection refer less to anoriginal separated absolute life, than to the first-person self-affection which isineluctably suffused with its Befindlichkeit. Thus whereas any affect can beilluminated by the intentional reference to the world, the affect, e.g., joy, can beconsidered purely in itelf in its purely pathic modality as suffusing pre-reflective


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self-awareness. As such it is an absolute self-experience which is its owncontent. As such, Henry maintains, it bears in itself the absolute essence oflife, being nothing but another mode of this absolute life.

This would seem to be further buttressed by the consideration that theaffect, e.g., pain or joy, which is always necessarily a first-person experiencingof the affect, might well involve an error about its cause or, e.g., there mightbe an error about joys appropriateness in regard to the events of the world, orbecause of the complexity of the situation I might not really be experiencingwhat I thoughtlessly called joy. But there can be no doubt about theexperiencing, indeed the self-experiencing, of the affect which I confusedlycalled joy.36

The basic question here for Henry is this: Granted that the revelation of theself-affection or feeling to itself is at the same time a revelation of the object towhich it is (intentionally) related, is the former essentially co-determined bythe latter? Henrys position is clearly that it is the self-affection itself whichreveals itself and nothing else and that to exhaust ones description by attributingto the feeling the power of relating itself to the specific object is to forget thepower of revelation peculiar to self-affection or affectivity itself. But as to thequestion just raised, he wants to affirm that the determination and disclosureof the object are less fundamental than affectivity. Affectivity as self-affectionconstitutes the foundation of all possible affection in general.37 In this sensethe answer to the question is, No.

What this means is that self-affection is the foundation of all action, all will

by which Henry clearly means the power of action,fiat, deciding, choosing,resolving, etc. Will is born on the crest of the wave of the original self-affectings;it comes into being on the basis of self-affections. Will cannot change or bringinto being self-affection because the latter is the source of the original capacityof self-determination of the self (see below, section 7). Will and action areradically impotent in regard to their foundation in self-affection; indeed self-affection essentially eludes will as an object in any sense. What is willed isalways outside of the will, always transcendent in some sense; yet self-affectionis immanent within will and bears it as the very possibility of will.38 Thus thereis a radical contingency and impotence at the heart of being as founded in self-affection. Everything which we are able to do is without importance, at least

with regard to what is essential, namely our interior transformation andregeneration. . .39 Even in the early 1963 writing Henry sees here the theologicalthemes of predestination and grace. The inability of assuring oneself of onessalvation is ultimately not a matter of the relation of ones action to onesbeing, e.g., developing habits, getting rid of vices, but rather it is a matter ofthe internal structure of ones being. As selves we are originally passive andimpotent in regard to our being selves.40

Thus in regard to the phenomenological philosophies of religion there areinteresting parallels. For Husserl too there is something more basic than our


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acts of will, our actions, and more basic even than our fleeting feelings oraffections. These are all derived and work in tandem with the occurrent worldlyexperiences to determine how and why we act the way we do. But these areall founded on a basic dimension, the latent will, that coincides with thedivine and what is most basic within us.41 But for Husserl (and, e.g., Schelerand Blondel) what we have proper and immediate evidence for is the ongoingflux and phases of experience which are seen to always have an infinite ecstatichorizon: Life is characterized by the insufficiency of the filled intentions andthe inadequacy of the promise of our empty intentions with their fulfillments.Husserl notes that the world has in juxtaposition to the necessary ideal of anincrease [in value] in infinitum an infinite lack (F I 24, 149). It is no accidentthat the human . . . never arrives at satisfaction. . . Hua XV, 404.) And thisserves as a pointer to an immanent divine will. The human will must alignitself with the divine will which is at once more intimate than ones mostinterior and more transcendent than ones highest goal. But for Henry theseclaims and the experiences which give rise to them only point to the emptinessof the world and a demonstration that there can be no joy or wisdom in therealm of transcendence.

Further, for such philosophical theologians of an infinite intentionality,42

this latent or basic nisus, dynamism, teleology, etc. which launches the spiritbeyond the transcendence of the transcendence of the world is still somethingwith which we must coincide by renouncing our own will. (Cf., e.g., Hua XV,378381.) For Henry, such a theological theme is fundamentally askew because

what is at stake is retrieving our transcendental Sonship and realizing we arenot of this world, not because our destiny transcends the worldstranscendence but because all transcendence is ontologically inane. But Husserl(and, e.g., Blondel) can echo what is basic for Henry: For them also there is afundamental passivity in the receiving of this basic will and the way it informsineluctably the flux of our life. As such this view also affirms some sense ofgrace as prior to and foundational of all agency. 43 And although thesephilosophies, in contrast to Henry, affirm a transcendent good surpassing thetranscendence of the world and which is the essential transcendence andtherefore unachievableparousia,44 they also, like Henry, affirm a transcendencein immanence of which we are inclined to be unmindful. (We will return to this

in section 7. below.)

6. Fundamental Theology

Fundamental theology in Christianity traditionally sought motives for beliefin God and in a divine revelation. Typically the issue centered around, on theone hand, the requirement to let God be God, i.e., to acknowledge that faithand salvation are a matter of grace. To posit a kinship with God, an innate idea


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or a natural desire for God, may be seen to reduce Gods transcendence tofinite folly.On the other hand, there was also the constellation of beliefs that grace

does not destroy but elevates by supplementing nature; and revelation as GoodNews could only be welcomed by humans because at some deep level itanswered the fundamental desire of the heart or saturated the ecstaticintentionality beyond being or beings. In the latter case we see that fundamentaltheology is connected to our prior theme of the minds teleology.

Henry does not fit easily into this traditional spectrum. He posits indeed aradical kinship of humanity with God, i.e., humans are essentially Sons ofGod (see section 7 below). But at the same time the issue remains unclearwhether the revelation of this kinship is exclusively Gods own doing, eventhough perhaps Henrys radical life-phenomenology may serve as a propadeutic;or whether the kinship is simply transcendental phenomenology brought to adeeper level.

In some discussions Henry draws near to the fundamental theologicalepistemological issue of the motivation for faith and how one recognizes thedivine as the divine in a revelation. This, of course, is not the issue of proofsof the existence of God. (See 194 ff.) These for Henry are a kind of absurdityin so far as they place the divine before judicial powers and declare that thedivine, if it be, must announce itself in accord with the expectations andpresuppositions of the judges. Here God as a hypothesis is placed before themind as something strange and an anomaly in our modes of reference,

intentionality, and conceptuality. If God exists then he must fit within thisschema and the pre-established conditions. But the existence of the referent ofGod as a concept, like the existence of the referent of I, would not bepossible if we did not have first of all a primal manifestation which was priorto the reference and had nothing to do with our intellectual understanding orsense perception. Thus when Anselm, subsequent to his proof asks his soul,if you have found God why do you not feel what you have found? Why,Lord, does my soul not feel then that it has found you? Henry claims that theanswer is because the divine is manifest only in the living of life and neverthrough a kind of worldly intentionality. Hiddenness and invisibility characterizesthe essence and the divine, because they characterize the realm of immanence

or immediate non-reflexive self-consciousness. The invisible is thus given apositive character: it both makes the immanence of the essence possibleand determines the essence of immanence; the power of the kind of revelationof immediate self-experience is the power of night. (See for all this 194 ff.)45

The essential invisibility of God which is inseparable from the invisibility ofthe essence is not the invisibility of something beyond our range of vision orsphere of intellectual comprehension. Nor is it the invisibility of a being whochooses to hide. It is the invisibility characteristic of what is immediately non-intentionally self-manifesting.46 Meister Eckhart has it right: Seeking God as


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something foreign to the soul and life, something to be achieved by knowingwhat is outside of us, is not to find God. Life flows unmediated from God intothe soul. What is life? Gods Wesen, Gods being, is my life (Eckhart). Butlife is not a being, not even a god; and so God is not something to be known.The greatest pleasure of the spirit is in the nothingness of its archetype.47

Once again, anything whatsoever in order to be manifest, has as the conditionof its manifestation, the self-awareness, self-suffering of transcendental life.This primal revelation as the apriori transcendental condition of whatever appearsis also the primal revelation of God. Therefore the proof for the existence ofGod, like the proof for the existence of the I and inseparable from it forHenry must always presuppose a prior familiarity and immediacy ofexperience. Indeed, the classical proof for the existence of God involves thepresumption that every mode of manifestation is worldly, i.e., through exteriorityand intentionality, and that God is foreign to the original self-experience of lifeand must therefore be made manifest in exteriority and intentionality (193 ff.)

But, we may here return to our earlier remarks on God, teleology, andBonum and ask: If the divine is not connected with the fulfillment of thehearts desire, which at least provides a condition for self-deception and idolatry,what is there about the original self-experiencing of life which links or identifiesit with the divine? Furthermore, granted the ineluctable undeniable self-manifesting of life, and granting that the divine must be self-manifesting, is theChristian explication of life merely a logical fit or phenomenologicalachievement? If insight or recognition of the divine as the divine, e.g., as the

answer to basic questions about the ultimate meaning of life, is often understoodas a kind of (filling) intentional act, what is the nature of the recognition inHenrys theology where such a questioning and filling are necessarily atranscendental illusion because tied to intentionality and the world? Is it agrace which permits us to see this fit or the fittingness of this (Henrys)explication? What if one finds other fits or other explications? Are they equallylegitimate? or are they perverse? or logically false? (One thinks especially ofShankara in conjunction with this matter because in many ways he foreshadowsHenry in writing a theology centered around what Henry calls the essence.)48

Of course Henry would caution that the desire to fit the divine to Bonumand the heart or the will is natural because the failure to appreciate the unique

hiddenness and absence of the revelation of life is due to a kind of transcendentalforgetfulness this perhaps is as close as Henry gets to original sin. And it is thisforgetfulness and privileging of transcendence and the world which have sustainedthe illusory and pathological aspect of religion. Thus the revelation of life is notto be dismissed because it does not have properties like gods or a SupremeBeing; these are all expressions of the darkness of the truth of the world.

And finally he would ask, what does it mean to hear the voice of God, torecognize the truth of God in someone representing Him to you face to face?What does it mean to recognize the word of God in Scriptures described as the


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Word of God? His answer is that it is not the word of scriptures which teachesus to understand the word of Life. Rather it is the word of Life, making of usat each instant children of God,

which reveals, in its own truth, the truth to which the word of Scripturesmake reference. The one who hears this word of life knows that it speakstruly in as much as there is self-heard in it the word which installs one inlife.49

In short it is not the word of God which renders the word of Life but the wordof Life which renders the word read or heard the word of God.

But is this to say that the word of life enables us to take the word ofscriptures as the word of God? Is life (or Life) here functioning as a mode ofintentionality, a mode ofAuffassung founded in passive-synthesis, enablingthe understanding of scriptures? I do not find a direct treatment of the issue.Henrys prima facie answer is a phenomenological explication of the Gospel ofJohns No one comes to the Father except through me (John 6:44): As theSon only reveals himself in the self-revelation of the Father and while theFather reveals himself only in the self-revelation of the Son, the path to Christ,i.e., to divine revelation, can only be the repetition of the primal-, or arch-transcendental birth of the Son in the bosom of the Father. For Henry this isknowing the process of the self-generation of the Life which has generated itin its condition of First Living (see 8689).

We will look at this (in section 7. below) in more detail. But what is most

astonishing is that for Henry all this is a way of talking about the first-personexperience of life in its being non-reflexively lived. Crucial throughout is thatthe revelation cannot be heteronomy in the sense of having its source in theworld and exteriority; rather it must be heteronomous to this heteronomy. Norcan it be the autonomy of insight and third-person evidence arising from theworld and exteriority; that, as knowledge, is not autonomous enough andcomes too late. It cannot be anything less, and, more surprisingly, it seems thatit cannot be anything more, than the first-person living of life, and this may beseen as what the the Father generates in generating life in its condition of thearch-Son and Christ as the First Living.

But note that this does not mean there is a separate experience of the

divine, i.e., ofthe divine. There is surely no experience of a categorial realmcalled the divine. As for Husserl, the divine is not a Wesen or an eidos. Suchexperiences take place within the world or within being. God is not part of theworld and is beyond being. As the primal manifestation is not a manifestationof . . . (genitive of manifestation) to . . . (dative of manifestation) so the divineis not something manifest in its being contrasted with anything else. It is notsomething to which intentionality has access, even if one frames it as beyondthe world and beyond being. God is beyond and without being in the sensethat the realm of immanence is without and beyond being.


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But if this is to have some philosophical phenomenological sense it meansthat this word of life, understood as the passive self-affecting, i.e., as the self-consciousness making the reference of the first-person pronoun possible, is thesufficient condition for the revelation. In order to see why this is not quite rightfor Henry we must enter into the heart of Henrys phenomenology of theChrist. When one listens to the word of Life, first person awareness of lifemust be enlarged to contain lifes essential word or self-ness (ipseity), theEternal Word.

7. Divine Sonship and Transcendental Life

As is now evident Henrys theology is emphatically immanent and we shall seethat, to speak with Husserl, there is a kind of transcendence in the immanence(256)50. The word of life in the natural attitude is transformed into the EternalWord of Life of the transcendental attitude. And as in the more classicaltheologies the task is transcending the transcendence of the world so in Henryiantheology the task is retro- or intro-scending, deepening, or immanentizing theimmanence.

Henrys analyses of birth and the gift of life are means for understandinghow immanence has a kind of transcendence within it. For Henry, weunderstand birth best as the coming not into the world but into life, i.e., intoself-affection. Recall that a joy, for example, has the content of joy, that

worldly event in regard to which I am joyful. Yet primal self-suffering, lifeitself as the non-reflexive joy-experiencing, produces the content of its affection,the content that it itself is. Lifes engendering the content is a self-donationwhich is also a self-revelation, i.e., the original transcendental pathos. Eventhough self-affecting is a self-suffering and self-receiving, and therefore is notmy doing, i.e., not in the realm of my egological powers, still it is happening.For Henry there is here a theological therefore: therefore it is Lifes self-generation. It is this generation by Life of itself by itself that Henry designatesas the strong sense of self-affection. In the strong self-affecting I am given tomyself independent of any agency on my part whereas in the weaksense ofself-affection I am present to and constitutive of myself on the basis of some

agency of mine. The former is strong because it is not suffered or received byLife but effected by Life in Lifes selfing or self-affection. This strong senseof auto-affection is that of the absolute phenomenological life, i.e., Life, andbelongs only to it.

Life as the realm of passive genesis (and non-intentional synthesis) is notan achievement of the I, but rather I, self, etc. emerge out of this. Life as myelemental self-awareness is a self-affection, an auto-affection which is hetero-effected, not from the heteros of the world but from within. More basic thanthe I is the autos out of which the I emerges: cogito ergo cogitor. More basic


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than life as my self-affecting is Life as the effecting of my self-affecting. Thepower to auto-affect life belongs to God (135).Why does Henry say this? Qua phenomenologist he only experiences the

suffering and passivity of life, i.e., the effect, the auto-affection that he claimsis Gods effecting; he does not experience Gods effecting the auto-affectionof life. Why he holds this seems to be twofold. First there is the argumentfrom symmetry between (and seeming equivalence of) Gods self-revelationand the minds non-reflexive self-manifestation: God/Life/mind cannot berevealed by anything less or other than itself. But there is also the insightemergent from penetrating into life and discovering Christianitys power toilluminate its transcendence in immanence. (See section 3. above.)

The strong sense of self-affection is one in which Life on its own givesitself to itself; it is within the power of Life and in its power alone to self-donate itself to itself. [Henry seems to ascribe to the divine a kind ofcausa suiand ens a se (aseity) status. See sections 910 below.] The strong auto-affection results in me being given to, receiving, myself. Henry nicely developsHusserls notion of how this original sense of I myself involves having myself.Through the original passive genesis I experience my original possibility, foremostin retention and protention. Following Husserl,51 he calls this I-can, i.e., I havethe lived original power to act, i.e., I experience in an elemental way myself withcapacity, e.g., I can recall, imagine, move, act, reflect, interpret, etc. The weaksense of self-affection is the actuation of the original capacity that one has buthas not given to one self but which is given in the strong self-affection. This

actuation is the beginning of the transcendental I as an agent of manifestation; itis also the origin of the I of agency. Again, one may think of this original self-actuation and self-formation of ones self-having as a consequence of andactuation of the I-can emergent out of self-affection. Prior to my proper self-involving, self-qualifying, self-reflexive acts where I am both nominative andaccusative of the agency,52 the subject and object, in self-affection I am in amore elementary way the one who both is the affected as well as the affecting,the object or content and subject of this affection. As Husserl says (paceHenry), prior to any form of self-perception, self-reference, there is an unreflectiveI-life or consciousness for which, as Henry rightly says, the agent-I is in no wayresponsible (see Hua IV, 248). For Henry, in the strong sense of self-affecting

the divine is the agent and nominative and we are constituted and accusative; inthe weak sense of self-affecting we are, in some sense, (constituted andderivative) agents and nominatives as well as accusatives of our own agency.

This last point needs to be spelled out. This strong self-creating self-affection,in which I am passively bequeathed to myself by myself, i.e., by myself as notyet the I of manifestation and agency, is a contingent reception or accepting ofmyselfwolle-nolle, i.e., it is not something that has to happen nor does the Ias source of agency and action have the least power to bring it about.53 Thisaccepting of myself from myself as passive self-genesis, Henry holds to be


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the accusative to Lifes effecting. What Life effects is the self-affecting ofitself which as the exemplary selfness or ipseity is the condition for my selfness.At this level, the self (Moi) as generated cannot refer to itself in the nominativebut only in the accusative (171). From this perspective, (and this reader hasgreat difficulty seeing Henrys move here as still a transcendentalphenomenological claim), I am a me and not yet anI.54

Thus I am an accusative of Life before and as the necessary conditionfor my being a nominative, i.e., a source of self-referring. And that beforedoes not involve a temporal past sequence because my self-affection is anincessant self-experiencing and self-suffering and in the course of this self-undergoing my self is generated.55 And even prior to the achievements of I asagent of manifestation and action I am already individuated.56 This self-individuating pre-egological self-affection is acknowledged by Henry to be aform of temporality.

But the attaining by which the ego attains itself in itself is that by whichabsolute life originally succeeds in itself. In the auto-temporalization of itsauto-pathic affection life is experienced (sprouve) in its essential ipseity asthis singular self which is the I myself to which the ego ought to be an ego.Thereby is achieved the birth of the transcendental ego, and what we herewish to underline, is that this achievement is an absolute immanence whichis that of life.57

Absolute Life is originally experienced by me in the ipseity or self-ness which

is my original self-affecting consciousness. (The sense in which this primalself is I, whether primal-I or not, is problematic; it surely does not have,because it is prior to, the sense of I that I achieve in first-person utterances,it does not achieve oneself as oneself.) Generated as a singular self-luminousself in Lifes self-engendering I am transcendentally born. And in as much asthis primal-generation is only a mode of self-generation of absolute life whichis not born, I am unborn.58

But I, as the I of capacities, the I of I can, and eventually the I of acts andresponsibilities, have not brought myself into this condition of experiencing orundergoing myself. I witness or suffer pre-preflexively myselfs ongoingemergent self-manifestation through self-affections without being the sourceof this manifestation. I am given to myself without this donation depending onme in any way. Thus my self-affecting is only through the absolute Life effectinga self-affecting in me.

Again, this effecting of a self-affecting in me which is my transcendentalbirth has as its eternal precondition absolute Lifes coming to itself. Henrynames this the divine lifes self-donation and self-revelation. The self onlyauto-affects in as much as absolute Life auto-affects in it. (136)

The distinction between strong self-affection and weak self-affection,between, on the one hand, my passivity and receptivity of ipseity in the


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stream of self-affections which effect the self-affection which makes me me,and not yet I, and, on the other hand, my actuation of this original I-can byself-qualifying and character-forming I-me acts (Husserl) is the pheno-menological center for Henrys Christian theological explication. But the

justification for the move from the weak self-affection to God as the source ofthe strong self-affection is not evident phenomenologically. It would seem tobe, although Henry never puts it this way, a faith-informed taking-as, anintentional act, which enables this explication. Although this is a possbileinterpretation, it disrupts the purely philosophical explication from within therealm of immanence. Nevertheless for Henry this is a perfectly natural movebecause for the one who penetrates into the immanent essence of life thepower of Christianity to illuminate the depths or immanence of life is evident.(71) Thus Henry finds the Christian doctrine of God as a trinity (or at least adyad) able to illuminate the depths of Life.

Before we turn to this illumination we must note that although all humansare transcendentally born, most are afflicted with a transcendental illusion andmust be reborn. That is, they are caught in the truth of the world and seektherein their identity and salvation. (See section 8. below.) In actuality theiressential selfness is a participation in Lifes own self-affection and ipseity.Divine Life is the Life that self-affects itself absolutely, i.e., it does not sufferits self-affection, but rather it itself achieves it. (Cf. our discussion above insection 3 of divine self-revelation.) Henry holds that Life or the Father hasipseity through the self-affection which is the Son; the Father, therefore,

considered abstractly, is a part of a whole (perhaps best understood as aHusserlian abstract moment, not a piece) and therefore is not yet self, not yetipseity, and a fortiori not yet I in any sense. There would be no ipseity, noself-affection were it not for Lifes own enacted, not suffered, self-affection.This essential ipseity is called the First Living or the Christ or the eternal Sonor the Primal Son, whereas all other forms of transcendental life must stemfrom being born of this life of the First Living. The Christ or the Eternal Sonis the selfness effected through the active, strong, self-affecting of Life itself.And the selfness of the born transcendental I, the selfness of any life (withoutthe capitals) is itself selfness only through the original selfness of Lifes ownactive strong-self-affecting. That is, my endured/received ipseity emergent

from my passive self-affecting is possible only through the active strongeffected self-effecting of Life. This ipseity of Life, the eternal Son, is alsonamed the pathic flesh and it is is what binds Life to itself and binds me tomyself in such a way that I am and am able to be that which I am (146). It isnot so much that Christ is at first the medium between man and God but Herather is the medium between each self and itself, the relation to the selfwhich permits each self or me to be a self or accusative of Life (147).

In a rich interpretation of the parable of the shepherd and the sheep (I amthe door of the sheep: who enters by me will be saved, and will go in and out


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and find pasture; John 10:9). Henry claims that no self is possible that wouldnot have as its phenomenological substance, as its flesh,59 the phenomenologicalsubstance and flesh of the Primal Son (147). Christ is seen to be thetranscendental condition for the self-referentiality out of which the mebecomes an I, an agent of disclosure and action. Because I am myself onlythrough the living flesh of Christ, I am not my own flesh; I am not the doorand source of the nourishment, the grass of the pasture; I am not that whereinthe transcendental ipseity is grounded; rather, Christ is all this. And this sameflesh is the door, the entrance, not merely to the one transcendental I which Iam, but to the totality of living transcendental Is. I have access then to anothertranscendental I only by going through that original ipseity which relates the Ito itself in that it makes a self out of it.

It is impossible to touch flesh unless one goes through an original Flesh thatby reason of its essential ipseity gives to this flesh this feeling itself andexperiencing itself. It is impossible to touch this flesh without touching thatother flesh that has made flesh of him. It is impossible to strike anotherwithout striking Christ (148).

8. Transcendental Illusion and Transcendence in Immanence

Jesus question to his disciples, Who do people say that I am? is thus answeredin the following way by Henry: The Eternal Son made flesh is at once the

necessary condition for selfness; but it is also the scandalous worldlymanifestation of what is essentially unworldly and hidden; it is also the revelationthat access to Christ is excluded as long as the human understands himself as abeing of this world (119); and, finally, it would seem that it is also a makingevident that the deeper sense of the visible is the invisible flesh of Christ, thatthe truth of the world is to be transformed into the hidden flesh of Christ.60

For Christianity one is living, one is a transcendental I, only as son ofGod. The relation of Life to the living I is the relation of the absolute Beforeto the transcendental I; it can never be broken without ipseity being destroyed.The relation of the transcendental I to the absolute Before is not essentiallyreciprocal; the former cannot exist without the latter, but the latter is essentially

independent of the former. The self-generation of Life results in the ipseity bywhich all other selfness is effected. Henry can draw upon both Johannine aswell as Pauline texts in support of his position.

The transcendental illusion occasions the need for a retrieval of onestranscendental birth, i.e., a rebirth. Christian life is the reversal by which onelives no longer from out of the truth of the world but out of the Truth of Life.(See especially chapters 810.) Everyone who has come into the world is bornof the invisible eternal Life and Light of the Son. And the light which they areis not the light of the world nor is it accepted by the world; but neither has the


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world extinguished it. But all must be reborn because of their forgetfulness ofthe essence. The forgetfulness is inseparably a lostness in the world. Whatthe world means is the evangelical sense as illuminated by radical life-phenomenology; but at the same time the unfolding of this sense of life andthe world are inseparable from Henrys reading of the New Testament,especially the Gospel of John.

The transcendental illusion therefore is not merely the forgetfulness involvedin ones being lost in the world; it is the unmindfulness of ones Sonship. Oneway of grasping this is through Henrys analyses of the Beatitudes of theSermon on the Mount where we find, once again, a case for immanence as theparousia.

What [each] Beatitude celebrates and blesses is the ultimate metaphysicalsituation which wills that in each form of life, even in the most unfortunate,there is accomplished the essence of absolute Life, its self-donation accordingto the structure of suffering in which it arrives to itself in its pathic embrace.(257258)

The Beatitudes curses as well as the blessings point out the relation betweenthe particular form of life and absolute Life. In particular the woes (e.g.,Luke 6: 2425) highlight the transcendental illusion of one who is unmindfulof his Sonship, i.e., enjoys his life as if it were not a gift and as if its sourcewere to be found in his autonomy; that is, as if the only form of self-affectionwere the weaker form. Henry singles out wealth and eroticism as possibilities

for this transcendental illusion. In both cases the person may succumb to thetemptation to believe that the wealth/pleasure is not a gift from a transcendent(in immanence) source but rather due to himself and his own resources. Sucha giving is the transcendence present in every form of immanence, atranscendence which has nothing to do with exteriority to oneself; that eachself-affection, each suffering of oneself, is a possibility, on the one hand, toflee oneself by experiencing life as happening from without or as a result ofones own agency or, on the other hand, to experience ones very ipseity in allits tonalities as a gracious effect and thereby to liberate oneself to ones trueidentity as Son.

Behind the paradox of the Beatitudes, i.e., that the self-affections of pleasureand well-being are cursed and the self-affections of humiliation and pain areblessed, there is to be found a secret: Both suffering and joy are apodicticallyexperienced and therefore inseparable from the Life of the absolute or God;but the transcendental life of humans is not consubstantial with this life; andonly if the apodictic self-affection is liberated from its transcendental illusiondoes the ineluctable and indubitable self-affection of joy and suffering bear themark of unity with the divine Life. (See 256 ff.) Perhaps we can say thatHenrys theory of self-awareness as self-affection is a celebration ofpathoswithin pure immanence; but in so far as the person is so tied to the world that


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he is drawn toward being unmindful of the transcendental sonship the doctrineshifts to one of worldly apatheia.Although, as we have seen, the Platonic-Augustinian themes of a theology

tied to infinite desire, absence, and emptiness at the core of human existenceare banned because of their commitment to transcendence, it is at this pointthat these ancient theological themes surface in Henry. Whereas for the Platonic-Augustinian tradition the hunger for wordly goods was at bottom a naturaldesire for God as the ultimate telos of the human heart, the goods themselves,even the non-worldly good which is oneself or ones soul, are hierarchicalciphers for the goodness and beauty which God is. (Augustine: Your God isnot heaven or earth or any other body. . . But your God is for you too the lifeof your life.61) God is thus both the whence and whither of human life.Henry, on the other hand is closer to Plotinus: The Whence is the better; theWhither is less good: the Whither is not of the quality of the Whence-and-Whither, and the Whence-and Whither is not of the quality of the Whencealone.62 The divine Life as the source of the strong self-affection out ofwhich emerges the ego with its capacities is the Johannine source of eternalliving water from which Jesus immediately drinks and gives to drink. (John 4:13, 3234) Every ego who experiences himself in an abiding transcendentalillusion as the source of all his capacities and feelings also experiences aterrifying lack, emptiness, and rupture (259). For such the yoke of life isheavy. It is only the recognition that ones life is born by and a result of theself-donation of absolute Life which can make this burden light. Such a

recognition is like the discovery of ones buoyancy by one who despairinglybelieves that he can stay afloat only by thrashing about with all his might. But,as we have noted, for Henry the source of this recognition is not easy todetermine. According to Henrys principles, on the one hand, it could noteasily be a seeing-as derived from, e.g., reading Henry; but nowhere is itclearly stated that it would have to be the gift itself of divine Lifes self-affection. But he does play with the idea that it is like the feeling of the onecursed, the one for whom it would have been better not to be born; for suchthis feeling of being cursed is not something the ego gives to itself, but issomething suffered.

Thus the ancient theme of the restlessness of the heart still finds its way

into his thought.

63

We have seen that theparousia of original self-manifestationis not initially appreciated by the one caught in the primacy of being and/or theworld or what Henry calls the transcendental illusion, which is forgetfulnessof the constitutive transcendence in immanence or ones condition as Son.(256 ff.) This is not a transcendence of exteriority but a transcendence in allimmanent modes of life. The restlessness of the heart of classical theologystems from searching for the parousia in intentionality, in the exteriority of thetranscendence of the world. The Beatitudes show that there is a parousiapossible even in all of life because both suffering and joy are basic features of


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Lifes original self-affection.64

Henry seems to say that because all needs properlyseen are needs of the self, and the needing of the self is at its basic level a giftas well as the need and suffering of the absolute, all experience of sufferingand pain is a basis of joy.

For Henry to say that the infinite desire and restlessness of the heart asframes of intentional acts are alien to the truth of life requires demonstratingthat with the insight into the truth of life and the transcendence in immanencethe restlessness is eliminated. For Henry this is only possible by his positingthe identity of the God of Christianity with the truth of life as construed byHenry. But assuming there is this stilling of the heart, which description bestaccounts for it? Is it the experienced (and therefore phenomenologically evident)graciousness of Lifes gift of a transcendental re-birth, or is it rather becauseof the act of faith which transposes the referent of the empty intention of theparticular truth of the world which Husserl calls the truth of the will,65 i.e.,the infinite will of the Good corresponding to the unique individual, to theHenryian explication of the truth of life in terms of the Gospel of John?

We may note, however, that for Husserl the basic latent will (cf. Blondelswilling will) that is there from the start most properly grasps itself when itrealizes that it is notfulfilled primarily through the transcendence of what itmeets in the world. But such grasping itself is only possible because of its priorfamiliarity with itself, a prior self-affection, at this most basic level. For Husserltoo, the truth of will is a discovery of an original constitutive self-affecting.And, seemingly connected to this position, when Husserl speaks of the heart

of religion lying in a drive or instinct of God, he claims that prayer thereforemust be directed not outwards but within to the immanence of God withinconsciousness. He does not discuss the nature of this turn within except to saythat it is not something private and is in a way parallel to the phenomenologicalturn within (E III 9, 22a-22b.)66Ifone must think of such intentional turningswithin as forms of world involvement, as is the case for Henry, then it wouldseem that prayer and the true self-gathering of oneself would be impossible.Thus a basic question is whether Henrys descriptions of the knowledge oflife as a mode of spirituality require such forms of intentionality, eventhough his theory would exclude them. Is the basic non-reflexive living throughof life all that is necessary, or is there not a mode of self-reference and self-

directedness required both for the explication as well as the authentic living ofthis life, one that is neither an active intending nor the sheer simple living oflife? Must there not be a kind of meditative attunement to the phenomenological-theological sense of ones passivity? A mindfulness that lets be, is greatefulfor, and counts on or trusts the self-endowing, all of which in this case wouldbe forms of non-worldly intentionality?

Husserls notion of God as a transcendence in immanence does justice toHenrys major concern (even though his presentation is thin in comparison toHenrys). But for Husserl God is entelechy and therefore the divine is di-polar,


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i.e., not only a transcendence in immanence but also a transcendence to thetranscendence of the world.67

Husserls position, further, has the obvious advantage of avoiding theexcessive devaluation of the world. As Rudolf Bernet has observed, whereasHusserl (in the reduction) and Christianity (in faith and practice) perform akind of withdrawal from the world, the net effect is to restore to the world itsproper integrity, indeed, to save the world, not to render it irredeemable, asdoes Henry in his own reduction.68

Yet Henry would respond that he does not destroy or damn the world butrather returns it to its true status, an expression of life. The critique of thebarbarism of modern technological-capitalist megamachine is precisely that itdefines the world apart from life and places power outside of and over life andlifes powers. The critique of the barbarism of the modern technological-capitalistmegamachine is precisely that it defines the world apart from life and displacesto the world lifes power so that life appears only under the conditions stipulatedby the world and as subject to the power of the world. 69

9. Some Questions Regarding the Metaphysics of Life

Running throughout Henrys discussions there are ancient philosophical andtheological themes. Not least of these is the underlying substance-metaphysics.Recall (see above section 1.) how we said that Henry sees temporality as

equivalent to worldly intentionality in so far as the temporal ecstases establishtime as a self-attaining by way of an exteriorization to oneself. (Also for thisdiscussion see 199 ff.) And in conjunction with this recall his view that thetruth of the world, which consists in time, is that appearing/disappearing inwhich all things of the world are caught. (200) For the birth of thetranscendental I, Lifes effecting self-affection is an absolute Before, theseparation from which is death, and the union with which is eternal life and

parousia. This effecting of self-affection is not a before enjoying the temporalecstasy of retention, the distance of which is overcome in memorys re-presencing. The absolute Before of transcendental birth escapes thehorizontality and exteriority of temporal exstases because Lifes self-generation,

its coming to itself, unfolds

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Henry C'est moi la vertité