Phenomenological life

Phenomenological life is the life considered from a philosophical

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...

 and rigorously phenomenological point of view.

Phenomenological life has been defined by the philosopher Michel Henry

Michel Henry

Michel Henry was a French philosopher and novelist. He wrote five novels and a great many philosophical works, and lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States of America, and Japan.- Biography :...

 as what possesses the faculty and the power "to feel and to experience oneself in every point of its being".

For Michel Henry, the life is essentially subjective force and affectivity, it consists in a pure subjective experience of oneself which oscillates permanently between suffering

Suffering

Suffering, or pain, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical, or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of...

 and joy

Joy

Joy may refer to:* Happiness, an emotion* Joy , people with the given name or surname Joy-Music:* Joy * Joy * Joy , by the Minutemen* Joy: A Christmas Collection* Joy...

.

Phenomenological life is the life considered from a philosophical

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...

 and rigorously phenomenological point of view.

Phenomenological definition of Life

Phenomenological life has been defined by the philosopher Michel Henry

Michel Henry

Michel Henry was a French philosopher and novelist. He wrote five novels and a great many philosophical works, and lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States of America, and Japan.- Biography :...

 as what possesses the faculty and the power "to feel and to experience oneself in every point of its being".

For Michel Henry, the life is essentially subjective force and affectivity, it consists in a pure subjective experience of oneself which oscillates permanently between suffering

Suffering

Suffering, or pain, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical, or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of...

 and joy

Joy

Joy may refer to:* Happiness, an emotion* Joy , people with the given name or surname Joy-Music:* Joy * Joy * Joy , by the Minutemen* Joy: A Christmas Collection* Joy...

. A "subjective force" is not an impersonal, blind and insensitive force

Force

In physics, a force is any agent that causes a change in the motion of a free body, or that causes stress in a fixed body. It can also be described by intuitive concepts such as a push or pull that can cause an object with mass to change its velocity , i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a...

 like those we meet in nature, but a living and sensible force experienced from the interior and resulting from an inner desire and from a subjective effort of the will to satisfy it.

The word "phenomenological" refers to phenomenology, which can refer to both subjective experience and a philosophical method to justify the study of such phenomena. What he has called the "absolute phenomenological life" is the subjective life of the individuals reduced to its pure inner manifestation, as we live it and feel it permanently. It is the life as it reveals itself and appears inwardly, its self-revelation: the life is both what reveals and what is revealed.

Properties of phenomenological Life

This life is invisible by nature because it never appears in the exteriority of a look, it reveals in itself without gap nor distance. The fact of seeing supposes indeed the existence of a distance and of a separation between what is seen and the one who sees it, between the object that is perceived and the subject who perceives it. A feeling for example can never be seen from the exterior, it never appears in the "horizon of visibility" of the world, it feels itself and experiences itself from the inner of the radical immanence of life. Love can’t be seen, no more than hatred, feelings are felt in the secret of our heart, where no look can penetrate.

This life is composed of sensitivity and affectivity, it is the unity of their manifestation, the affectivity being however the essence of the sensibility as Michel Henry has shown it in his book on The Essence of the Manifestation, which means that any sensation is affective by nature. The life is the foundation of our subjective experience (like the subjective experience of a sorrow, of seeing a color or the pleasure of drinking fresh water in summer) and of our subjective powers (the subjective power of moving the hand or the eyes for example).

Michel Henry also establishes a radical opposition between the living flesh endowed with sensibility and the material body, which is by principle insensitive, in his book Incarnation, a philosophy of the flesh.

Phenomenological vs. biological Life

This phenomenological definition of life is founded on our concrete subjective experience we make of life in our own existence, it thus corresponds to human life. About the other forms of life studied by biology and from which Heidegger derives its own philosophical conception of life, Michel Henry writes in his book I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity : "Is it not paradoxical for someone who wants to know what life is to go and ask protozoa, or, at best, honeybees? It is as if we had a relation with life that was every bit as totally external and fragile as the one we have with beings about which we know nothing – or very little. As if we were not ourselves living."

See also

For more precision on phenomenological life, see also the articles on the Philosophy of Life and on the Truth of Life.