For someone feeling himself as the source of all his powers and all his sentiments, especially his pleasures, someone who lives in the permanent illu… - Michel Henry

The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead, it is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are. But how can "everyone" -- that is, each individual as a living being -- know what life is, except in the respect that life knows itself and that this original knowledge of the self constitutes its own essence? Life feels and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it that would not be experienced or felt. This is because the fact of feeling oneself is really what makes one alive. Everything that has this marvelous property of feeling itself is alive, whereas everything that happens to lack it is dead. The rock, for example, does not experience itself and so it is said to be a "thing". The earth, the sea, the stars are things. Plants, trees, and vegetation are also things, unless one can detect in them a sensibility in the transcendental sense, that is to say, a capacity of experiencing itself and feeling itself which would make them living beings. This is life not in the biological sense but in the true sense -- the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else -- of what we will call subjectivity.

So my flesh is not only the principle of the constitution of my objective body, it hides in it its invisible substance. Such is the strange condition of this object that we call a body : it doesn’t consist at all in the visible appearance to which we have always reduced it ; precisely in its reality it is invisible. Nobody has ever seen a man, but nobody has ever seen his body either, if by "body" we understand his real body.

The relation of Life to the living is the central thesis of Christianity. Such a relation is called, from life’s viewpoint, generation, and from the living’s viewpoint, birth. It is Life that generates any conceivable living thing. But this generation of the living can be accomplished by Life only insofar as it is capable of engendering itself. A Life that is capable of engendering itself, what Christianity calls God, we are calling absolute Life – or, for reasons that will emerge later, absolute phenomenological Life. Insofar as the relation of Life to the living occurs inside God himself, it is produced as the generation of the First Living at the core of Life’s self-generation. Insofar as such a relation concerns not just God’s relationship with himself but also his relationship with man, it is produced as the generation of transcendental man at the core of God’s self-generation. […] What is generated in Life as the First Living Christianity calls the first-born Son, or the only Son, or, in Hebraic tradition, the Christ or Messiah. What is generated in Life as man, that is to say, as man himself, it calls “Son of God”. Absolute Life, as it engenders itself and, in doing so, engenders the First Living, is what Christianity calls Father.