Phenomenology
Henry’s Auto-Affective Self-Revelation of Life
Consciousness as Life’s Invisible Self-Feeling
Michel Henry argues that consciousness at its root is Life feeling itself: an immediate, invisible self-affection with no distance between what feels and what is felt. Awareness of objects in a world, which earlier phenomenologists took as basic, depends on this prior affective self-revelation. Phenomenal consciousness is therefore pathos, the suffering and enjoying in which life is given to itself, and it is the condition for anything, the physical included, to appear.
Michel Henry
What consciousness is
Consciousness is auto-affection: the first-person, pre-objective self-feeling by which a living being feels itself living, given in affects such as suffering, effort, joy, and desire.
Mind and body
Henry separates flesh (chair), the invisible, felt material in which life arrives in itself, from the visible body (corps) studied as an object. The objective body is real but founded on the prior reality of the flesh.
Mechanism
The duplicity of appearing: alongside the visible appearing of objects at a distance, there is an invisible self-revelation of Life that grounds it.
Core claims
- Western philosophy, phenomenology included, assumed only one mode of appearing (exteriority and distance), which Henry calls ontological monism.
- Husserl's intentionality, Heidegger's being-in-the-world, and Sartre's for-itself all place consciousness in a horizon of exteriority and miss its affective self-revelation.
- Affectivity is the transcendental condition of intentionality, not its content.
- Henry's flesh admits no reversibility between sentient and sensible, unlike Merleau-Ponty's, because reversibility would reintroduce distance.
Criticisms
Dan Zahavi, who credits Henry as a decisive theorist of pre-reflective self-awareness, objects that an immanence excluding all otherness makes intersubjectivity, time, and the world unintelligible. Dominique Janicaud charges Henry with a ‘theological turn’ that pushes phenomenology beyond its proper scope. Others argue his position is a monism as problematic as the dualism it opposes.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Unlikely
- Since consciousness here is Life's self-feeling in flesh, a machine known only through its visible operations offers no basis for it on Henry's view. Henry did not address machines directly.
- Survival beyond death: Uncertain
- In his final period the self is given to itself in a Life it does not ground, identified with God, which opens a theological horizon, but Henry's account does not spell out personal survival.
- Meaning and purpose: Cosmic/Ultimate
- It follows from his late view that each self is generated in divine Life, so meaning is grounded beyond human projects.
- Virtual immortality: No
- Life never appears as an object or pattern, so copying a body's visible organization or information would not carry its self-affection.
Related theories
- Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology (Critique)
- Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Perception and the Lived Body (Contrast)
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness (Influence)
- Sartre’s Pre-reflective Consciousness as For-Itself (Critique)
Sources
- The Essence of Manifestation, Michel Henry (1963)
- Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, Michel Henry (1965)
- Material Phenomenology, Michel Henry (1990)
- I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, Michel Henry (1996)
- Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, Michel Henry (2000)
- Michel Henry and the phenomenology of the invisible, Dan Zahavi (1999)
- The theological turn of French phenomenology, Dominique Janicaud (1991)
- Henry’s Auto-Affective Self-Revelation of Life, Landscape of Consciousness (Closer To Truth)