Meet The Man Who First Invent The " EXAMS"

Michel Henry (French: [ɑ̃ʁi]; 10 January 1922 – 3
July 2002) was a French philosopher and
novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous
philosophical works. He also lectured at
universities in France, Belgium, the United States
of America, and Japan.
Biography[edit]
Michel Henry was born in Haiphong, French
Indochina (now Vietnam), and he lived in French
Indochina until he was seven years old. Following
the death of his father, who was an officer in the
French Navy, he and his mother settled in
metropolitan France. While studying in Paris, he
discovered a true passion for philosophy, which
he decided to make his profession.[1] From June
1943 he was fully engaged with the French
Resistance, joining the maquis of the Haut Jura
under the code name of Kant. He often had to
come down from the mountains in order to
accomplish missions in Nazi-occupied Lyon, an
experience of clandestinity that deeply marked
his philosophy.[2]
At the end of the war he took the final part of
the philosophy examination at the university,
following which he wrote a thesis under the
direction of Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Paul
Ricœur, Ferdinand Alquié, and Henri Gouhier. His
first book, on the Philosophy and Phenomenology
of the Body, was completed in 1950. His first
significant published work was on The Essence
of Manifestation, to which he devoted long years
of necessary research in order to surmount the
main deficiency of all intellectualist philosophy,
the ignorance of life as experienced.[3]
From 1960, Michel Henry was a professor of
philosophy at the University of Montpellier, where
he patiently perfected his work, keeping himself
away from philosophical fashions and far from
dominant ideologies.[4][5] Le sujet unique de sa
philosophie, c’est la subjectivité vivante, c’est-à-
dire la vie réelle des individus vivants, cette vie
qui traverse toute son œuvre et qui en assure la
profonde unité en dépit de la diversité des
thèmes abordés.[6] He died in Albi, France, at
the age of eighty.
The sole subject of his philosophy is living
subjectivity, which is to say the real life of living
individuals. This subject is found in all his work
and ensures its deep unity in spite of the
diversity of themes he tackled.[7] It has been
suggested that he proposed the most profound
theory of subjectivity in the Twentieth Century.
A phenomenology of life[edit]
The work of Michel Henry is based on
Phenomenology, which is the study of the
phenomenon. The English/German/Latinate word
"phenomenon" comes from the Greek
"phainomenon" which means "that which shows
itself by coming into the light".[8] The everyday
understanding of phenomenon as appearance is
only possible as a negative derivation of this
authentic sense of Greek self-showing. The
object of phenomenology is not however
something that appears, such as a particular
thing or phenomena, but the act of appearing
itself.[9] Henry's thought led him to a reversal of
Husserlian phenomenology, which acknowledges
as phenomenon only that which appears in the
world, or exteriority. Henry counterposed this
conception of phenomenality with a radical
phenomenology of life.[10]
Henry defines life from a phenomenological point
of view as what possesses the faculty and the
power "to feel and to experience oneself in every
point of its being".[11] For Henry, life is
essentially force and affect; it is essentially
invisible; it consists in a pure experience of itself
which perpetually oscillates between suffering
and joy; it is an always begun again passage
from suffering to joy.[12] Thought is for him only
a mode of life, because it is not thought which
gives access to life, but life that allows thought
to reach itself.[13]
According to Henry, life can never be seen from
the exterior, as it never appears in the exteriority
of the world. Life feels itself and experiences
itself in its invisible interiority and in its radical
immanence. In the world we never see life itself,
but only living beings or living organisms; we
cannot see life in them.[14] In the same way, it
is impossible to see another person's soul with
the eyes or to perceive it at the end of a
scalpel.
Henry's philosophy goes on to aver that we
undergo life in a radical passivity, we are
reduced to bear it permanently as what we have
not wanted, and that this radical passivity of life
is the foundation and the cause of suffering.[15]
[16] No-one has ever given himself life. At the
same time, the simple fact of living, of being
alive and of feeling oneself instead of being
nothing and of not existing is already the highest
joy and the greatest happiness. Suffering and joy
belong to the essence of life, they are the two
fundamental affective tonalities of its
manifestation and of its "pathetic" self-revelation
(from the French word pathétique which means
capable of feeling something like suffering or
joy).[17]
For Henry, life is not a universal, blind,
impersonal and abstract substance, it is
necessarily the personal and concrete life of a
living individual, it carries in it a consubstantial
Ipseity which refers to the fact of being itself, to
the fact of being a Self.[18] This life is the
personal and finite life of men, or the personal
and infinite life of God.
Two modes of manifestation[edit]
Two modes of manifestation of phenomena exist,
according to Henry, which are two ways of
appearing: "exteriority", which is the mode of
manifestation of the visible world, and
phenomenological "interiority", which is the mode
of manifestation of invisible life.[19] Our bodies,
for instance, are in life given to us from the
inside, which allows us, for example, to move our
hands, and it also appears to us from the outside
like any other object that we can see in the
world.[20]
The "invisible", here, does not correspond to that
which is too small to be seen with the Unclad
eye, or to radiation to which the eye is not
sensitive, but rather to life, which is forever
invisible because it is radically immanent and
never appears in the exteriority of the world. No-
one has ever seen a force, a thought or a feeling
appear in the world in their inner reality; no-one
has ever found them by digging into the ground.
[21]
Some of his assertions seem paradoxical and
difficult to understand at first glance, not only
because they are taken out of context, but
above all because our habits of thought make us
reduce everything to its visible appearance in the
world instead of trying to attain its invisible
reality in life. It is this separation between visible
appearance and invisible reality which allows the
dissimulation of our real feelings and which
grounds the possibility of sham and hypocrisy,
which are forms of lies.[22]
Originality of Henry's thought[edit]
Western philosophy as a whole since its Greek
origins recognizes only the visible world and
exteriority as the sole form of manifestation. It
is trapped into what in The Essence of
Manifestation Michel Henry calls "ontological
monism"; it completely ignores the invisible
interiority of life, its radical immanence and its
original mode of revelation which is irreducible
to any form of transcendence or to any
exteriority.[23] When subjectivity or life are in
question, they are never grasped in their purity;
they are systematically reduced to biological life,
to their external relation with the world, or as in
Husserl to an intentionality, i.e. an orientation of
consciousness towards an object outside it.[24]
Henry rejects materialism, which admits only
matter as reality, because the manifestation of
matter in the transcendence of the world always
presupposes life's self-revelation, whether in
order to accede to it, or to be able to see it or
touch it. He equally rejects idealism, which
reduces being to thought and is in principle
incapable of grasping the reality of being which
it reduces to an unreal image, to a simple
representation. For Michel Henry, the revelation
of the absolute resides in affectivity and is
constituted by it.[25]
The deep originality of Michel Henry's thought
and its radical novelty in relation to all preceding
philosophy explains its fairly limited reception. It
is however a philosophy that is admired for its
"rigor" and its "depth".[26][27][28][29] But his
thought is both "difficult" and "demanding",
despite the simplicity and immediacy of its
central and unique theme of phenomenological
life, the experience of which it tries to
communicate.[30] It is the immediacy and
absolute transparency of life which explains the
difficulty of grasping it as a thought: it is much
easier to speak of what we see than of this
invisible life, which fundamentally avoids being
seen from the outside[31] · .[32]
Reception of Henry's philosophy[edit]
His thesis on The Essence of Manifestation was
warmly welcomed by the members of the jury,
who recognized the intellectual value and the
seriousness of its author, although this thesis did
not have any influence on their later works.[33]
His book on Marx was rejected by Marxists, who
were harshly criticized, as well as by those who
refused to see in Marx a philosopher and who
reduced him to an ideologue responsible from
Marxism.[34] His book on Barbarism was
considered by some as a rather simplistic and
overly trenchant anti-scientific discourse.
Nevertheless it seems that science and
technology too often pursue their blind and
unrestrained development in defiance of life.[35]
His works on Christianity seem rather to have
disappointed certain professional theologians and
catholic exegetes, who contented themselves
with picking out and correcting what they
considered as “dogmatic errors”.[36] His
phenomenology of Life was the subject of a
pamphlet on Le tournant théologique de la
phénoménologie française (The Theological Turn
in French Phenomenology) by Dominique
Janicaud, who sees in the immanence of life
only the affirmation of a tautological interiority.
[37] On the other hand, Antoine Vidalin published
a book entitled La parole de la Vie (The Word of
Life) in which he shows that Michel Henry's
phenomenology allows for a renewed approach
to every area of theology.[38]
As Alain David says in an article published in the
French journal Revue philosophique de la France
et de l'étranger (number 3, July – September
2001),[39] the thought of Michel Henry seems so
radical, it affects our habitual ways of thinking
so deeply, that it has had a difficult reception,
even if all his readers declare themselves
impressed by its "power", by the "staggering
effect" of a thought which "sweeps everything
clean on its way through", which "prompts
admiration", but nevertheless "doesn’t really
convince", as we don’t know whether we are
confronted by "the violence of a prophetic voice
or by pure madness".[40] In the same journal,
Rolf Kühn also asserts, in order to explain the
difficult reception of Michel Henry’s work, that
"if we do not side with any power in this world,
we inevitably submit to silence and to criticism
from every possible power, because we remind
each institution that its visible or apparent power
is, in fact, only powerlessness, because nobody
gives himself over to absolute phenomenological
life".[41]
His books have been translated into many
languages, notably English, German, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. A substantial
amount of work has been dedicated to him,
mainly in French, but also in German, Spanish
and Italian. A number of international seminars
have also been dedicated to the thought of
Michel Henry in Beirut, Cerisy, Namur, Prague,
Montpellier, Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve in 2010.
Michel Henry is considered by those who know
his work and recognize its value as one of the
most important contemporary philosophers,[42]
[43][44] and his phenomenology of life has
started to gain a following. A Michel Henry Study
Center has been established at St Joseph's
University in Beirut (Lebanon) under the direction
of Professor Jad Hatem.
Since 2006, the archives of the philosopher have
been deposited by his wife at the catholic
University of Louvain (Belgium), where they form
the Michel Henry archives Fund, placed under
the direction of Jean Leclercq. An annual review,
called Revue internationale Michel Henry, is also
edited by this Fund in collaboration with the
Presses universitaires de Louvain since 2010.
An information letter on Michel Henry in French,
called La gazette d'Aliahova (in reference to the
town of Aliahova described in the Michel Henry
novel L'Amour les yeux fermés), is published
every month by Roland Vaschalde since 2010.
The goal of this publication is to keep informed
of the articles, books, courses, seminars and
meetings on the thought of Michel Henry.
barbarie alla vita come auto-manifestazione. La
proposta fenomenologica di Michel Henry,
Aracne, 2010