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To understand man on the basis of Christ, who is himself understood on the basis of God, in turn rests on the crucial intuition of a radical phenomen… - Michel Henry
" "To understand man on the basis of Christ, who is himself understood on the basis of God, in turn rests on the crucial intuition of a radical phenomenology of Life, which is precisely that of Christianity: namely, that Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ, and for man. This is so because there is but a single and selfsame essence of Life, and, more radically, a single and selfsame Life. This Life – that self-generates itself in God and that, in its self-generation, generates the transcendental Arch-Son as the essential Ipseity in which this self-generation comes about – is the Life from which man himself takes his transcendental birth, precisely since he is Life and is explicitly defined as such within Christianity. He is the Son of this unique and absolute Life, and thus the Son of God. The tautological expression “Son of God” – tautological in that there are no sons except in Life and thus in God – conceals the profound truth that man’s essence, that which makes him possible as what he really is, is not man as we understand him, and still less some humanitas or other. Rather, it is the essence of divine life – that which makes him one of the living, and that alone.
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About Michel Henry
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.
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Phenomenological definition of God
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Additional quotes by Michel Henry
For someone feeling himself as the source of all his powers and all his sentiments, especially his pleasures, someone who lives in the permanent illusion of being a self-sufficient ego having only from itself its condition as ego as well as all that thereby becomes possible for it (acting, feeling, enjoying) – to that person what is lacking is no less than what constantly gives this ego to itself and is not it: absolute Life’s self-givenness, in which this ego is given to itself and everything else is simultaneously given to it (its powers and pleasures). This terrifying lack in each ego of what gives it to itself – what it is missing even when it feels itself as lacking for nothing, as sufficing to itself, and especially in the pleasure it has of being itself and believing itself the source of this pleasure – this is what determines the great Rift. This lack and absolute void is the Hunger that nothing can satisfy, the Hunger and Thirst for Life, which the ego has stopped feeling in itself at the same time as its condition as Son, when, in pleasure, it takes itself for the source of this pleasure and identifies with it as its own property. “Woe to those who are well fed now, for you will go hungry” (Luke 6;25).
Art will rediscover its way in a different type of nature (from the Galilean nature). The sensible qualities of this nature are not reduced to external features, as mere signs that are limited to 'representing' a foreign reality. These qualities are modes of life: impressions, tones and tonalities. This is what I mean: by tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature -- the true nature whose essence is Life -- is the cosmos. A dazzling claim from The Blaue Reiter Almanac, highlighted by Kandinsky himself, defines the Arche (or the Origin) where Art and Cosmos are identical: 'The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit'.
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Kandinsky is the inventor of abstract painting, the one who sought to overturn the traditional conceptions of aesthetic representation and to define a new area in this domain -- the era of modernity. In this regard, he appears as the 'Usher' or the 'Pioneer', to borrow the words of Tinguely. To understand Kandinsky's painting is to understand an art so new and so unusual that in its beginnings it only aroused scoffs, if not anger or spit. At the time of his death in 1944 in Paris, Kandinsky was still unknown to the French public, and misunderstood by the 'critics'. Today, one might wonder whether this situation has really changed.
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