The experience of red does not consist of perceiving a red object or the colour red as such and of taking it as being red; instead, it consists of ex… - Michel Henry

Here arises a critique of the Law within Christianity, formulated with rare violence by Christ, and for which Paul finds and wonderfully explains the ultimate motivation, which relates it to the Christianity’s central thesis, which places reality within life. It is precisely because the Law is transcendent and exterior to life and perceived by life as beyond it that it is deprived of reality. And by the same token, it is deprived of what finds in life’s reality the possibility of being fulfilled: action. The Law is thus unreal and powerless. Because it unites powerlessness with unreality, the Law places the whole system organized around it (especially the people to whom it is addressed) in an untenable situation. On the one hand, it prescribes, in the form of injunctions that are perceived quite clearly and thus indubitably: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and so on. On the other hand, however, this clearly enunciated commandment (not susceptible to being used for trickery) is by itself incapable of producing the action that suits it. “Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law” (John 7:19).

Man’s forgetting of his condition of Son relates not only to the Concern for the world in which he constantly invests himself. As we have seen, it is the phenomenological essence of Life that makes Life what is most forgotten, the Immemorial to which no thought leads. Because Forgetting defines its phenomenological status, life is ambiguous. Life is what knows itself without knowing it. That it suddenly knows it is neither incidental nor superfluous. The knowledge by which one day life knows what since the beginning it knew without knowing it is not of a different order than the knowledge of life itself: it is a pathetik upheaval in which life feels its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection. This possibility, which is always open to life, to suddenly experience its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection, is what makes it a Becoming. But then, when and why is this emotional upheaval produced, which opens a person to his own essence? Nobody knows. The emotional opening of the person to his own essence can only be born of the will of life itself, as this rebirth that lets him suddenly experience his eternal birth. The Spirit blows where it wills.

What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone.