33 Facts About Michel Henry

Michel Henry lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.

Michel Henry was born in Haiphong, French Indochina, and he lived in French Indochina until he was seven years old.

Michel Henry 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.

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.

Michel Henry died in Albi, France, at the age of eighty.

The work of Michel Henry is based on Phenomenology, which is the study of the phenomenon.

Michel Henry counterposed this conception of phenomenality with a radical phenomenology of life.

Michel Henry defines life from a phenomenological point of view as what possesses the faculty and the power "to feel and to experience oneself in each point of its being".

For Michel 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; 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'.

Michel 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.

For Michel 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.

Two modes of manifestation of phenomena exist, according to Michel 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.

For Michel Henry, God is nothing but the absolute phenomenological life which gives each ego to himself and which reveals to us both suffering and self-enjoyment.

Michel Henry opposes to the notion of creation, which is the creation of the world, the notion of generation of life.

Michel 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.

Michel Henry 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.

The deep originality of Michel Henry's thought and its radical novelty in relation to all preceding philosophy explains its fairly limited reception.

Michel Henry's books have been translated into many languages, notably English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese.

Michel Henry is considered by the specialists who know his work and recognize its value as one of the most important contemporary philosophers, and his phenomenology of life has started to gain a following.

An annual review, called Revue internationale Michel Henry, is edited by this Fund in collaboration with the Presses universitaires de Louvain since 2010.

Michel Henry says that first philosophy is identical with a universal ontology, because ontology is the science that studies Being in general, and it is necessarily universal as its object isn't such thing in particular or such kind of things, but what conditions them all equally.

The ego cogito is undeniable evidence or a first truth, so it is for Michel Henry the starting point and the true beginning of knowledge.

The power of acting, that Michel Henry calls the habit, is finally the real and concrete possibility of a world being given to us, it is a "possibility of knowledge in general".

Michel Henry undertook a study of the historical and philosophical genesis of psychoanalysis in the light of phenomenology of life in Genealogie de la psychanalyse, le commencement perdu, in which he shows that the Freudian notion of the unconscious results from the inability of Freud, its founder, to think the essence of life in its purity as affectivity and auto-affection.

Michel Henry's planned last book was entitled Le Livre des Morts and would have dealt with what he called "clandestine subjectivity": a theme which evokes the condition of life in the modern world and which alludes to his commitment to the Resistance and his personal experience of clandestinity.

Michel Henry wrote an important work on Karl Marx, whom he considers, paradoxically, as one of the leading Christian thinkers and one of the most important western philosophers, due to the weight he gives in his thought to living work and to the living individual in which he sees the foundation of economic reality.

The reading of Marx by Michel Henry starts by putting Marxism into parenthesis because Michel Henry considers that "Marxism is the whole of the misinterpretations that have been done about Marx".

Michel Henry was a student of ancient painting and of the great classical painting which preceded the scientistic figuration of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and of abstract creations such as those of the painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Michel Henry dedicated a book entitled Voir l'invisible to Kandinsky, in which he describes his work in laudatory terms.

Michel Henry explores painting's means of form and colour, and studies their effects on the inner life of one who looks at them filled with wonder, following the rigorous and almost phenomenological analysis proposed by Kandinsky.

Michel Henry evokes the great thoughts of Kandinsky, the synthesis of arts, their unity in monumental art, and the cosmic dimension of art.

Michel Henry tells us in this book that the purpose of the coming of Christ into the world is to make the true Father manifest to people, and thus to save them from the forgetting of Life in which they stand.

Michel Henry then proposes to elaborate a phenomenology of the flesh which leads to the notion of an original flesh which is not constituted but is given in the arch-revelation of Life, as well as a phenomenology of Incarnation.