Kandinsky’s singularity is due, moreover, to a circumstance that is vital for out project. The 'Pioneer' did not just produce a body of work whose se… - Michel Henry

The question of phenomenology, which alone confers a proper object to philosophy, is what makes it into an autonomous discipline -- the fundamental discipline of knowledge -- and not just a mere reflexion after the fact on what the other sciences have found. This question is no longer concerned with the phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears but with appearing. The invaluable contribution of historical phenomenology is to become aware of this appearing and to analyze it in and of itself. This is its theme. Again, this must not simply be the repetition of the traditional philosophical problem of consciousness or the greek aletheia. For the illusion of common sense, science and past philosophies is to understand the being of the phenomenon always as a first putting at a distance, the arrival of an Outside in which everything becomes visible, a "phenomenon", in the light of this Outside.

After the diagnosis of Barbarism, the phenomena of self-destruction have seen an enormous and violent intensification. This is not only visible in the streets. The nihilistic attack against all values, the defense of everything that is against nature and against life, expresses this even more. With violence, it is the development of technology outside of any norms that takes to the extreme this substitution of blind processes for the benefit of effort and the joy of living.

Thus the Christian ethic presents itself from the start as a displacement from the realm of the word, meaning also of thought and knowledge, to the realm of action. This displacement is decisive for three reasons. First, it leads the world’s truth back to Life’s. Second, dissipating all the illusions that traditionally link the truth to representation, to theory, and to their ecstatic foundation, it unequivocally relates Life’s Truth to the process of its self-engendering, to the power of an action. Third, in life, it is precisely no longer the ego’s power, the I Can constitutive of its will and freedom, that is at issue, but the “Father’s Will,” or the process of absolute Life’s self-engendering. Now the ethic can link the two lives, the ego’s and God’s, in such a way that it assures the former’s salvation in practice. To do the Father’s will designates the mode of life in which the Self’s life takes place, so that what is henceforth accomplished in it is absolute Life in its essence and by its requirements.