Husserl Studies 15: 183230, 1999. 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

183

Michel Henrys Phenomenological Theology of Life: A Husserlian Reading of Cest moi, la vrit
JAMES G. HART
Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA

Michel Henrys I am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity1 is a novel statement of the meaning of Christianity that purports to be, and in some important respects is, compatible with the ancient original one. It is most likely the last serious twentieth century attempt at a phenomenological theology yet it is the most properly phenomenological treatise on phenomenological theology and a phenomenology of religion. Michel Henrys work not only founds religious truth on transcendental phenomenological principles but makes inseparable the phenomenality of phenomena and basic religious themes. Although Henry is in discussion with almost all of the major voices in the phenomenological movement I believe that it is Husserls transcendental phenomenology to which he is closest.2 In what follows I will present a Husserlian reading of Henrys book; the more explicit and detailed Husserlian issues will be discussed primarily in the endnotes. For anyone interested in a transcendental phenomenological ontology and/or theology Henrys work can very well generate the ne plus ultra excitement of syn-theorein.

1. Original Non-Intentional Self-Manifestation For almost all authors other than Henry, whether they have an interest in phenomenological theology or not, non-reflexive self-awareness is, if a theme at all, a sub-theme or a theme among themes: It is a property of intentional acts or the life of the mind. In contrast, for Henry it is the foundational sense of transcendental life and there is a sense in which intentionality is not essential to it. For Michel Henry, phenomenology and, indeed, Western philosophy, are beset with monist understandings of appearing, phenomenon, manifestation, revelation, etc. Henry argues that even phenomenologists who uncover the distinctive and unique nature of non-reflexive awareness of

184 the life of the mind succumb to an inherent temptation to understand consciousness and phenomenality in terms of reference, transcendence, ecstasis, exteriority, intentionality, etc., i.e., in terms of consciousness directedness beyond itself to what is other than itself. As a result, when these thinkers turn the phenomenological gaze to pre-reflective awareness the result is that it is accounted for in terms of the properties of this intentional gaze. This is to say that the essence of phenomenality is accounted for in terms of transcendence or intentionalitys power to disclose, articulate, and make present being. Thus, e.g., Henry sees Husserl wanting to maintain that because the primal presencing itself is not now it is only self-present through its ecstasis in retention and in what it makes present in its vertical intentionality, i.e., the stream of acts and sensa.3 Thus what is missing even in phenomenological philosophy is a failure to see that transcendence or intentionality is not the primary consideration for the fundamental issue of what appearing is. The pervasive monist propensity hides the basic issue of the essence of phenomenality. The essence of manifestation, Henry argues with an inexhaustible finesse, is self-manifestation. There is no disclosure of something, no genitive of manifestation, unless there is a dative of manifestation which itself is uniquely self-present, i.e. here at this dative there is no genitive of manifestation for a dative of manifestation, no appearing of . . . to---.4 Not only is there no disclosure of the world unless I am selfconscious in a way which is essentially different from the worlds disclosure, but there is no epistemic, emotive, or volitional achievement unless I am aware of it. If I know, then, in a sense which is the key to Henryian thought, I know that I know; if I will then in some special way I know that I will. If I dont know that I know or know that I will, there is neither knowing nor willing, neither known nor willed. If we think, along with Husserl, of truth as the filling intention of what was meant in its absence (what was proposed by a proposition) as it was meant in its absence, then we link truth exclusively to the world, to intentionality and to reference. Yet there is no intending or referring whether emptily or fully without the original self-manifestation. For Henry this original disclosure, as the condition for all disclosure, is entitled also to the honorific term of truth. Another more Heideggerian way of expressing the monist prejudice is to say that intentionality is what enables something to be out of itself in the sense of not existing merely in itself but being something over-against and appearing to someone. When we insert individual acts in the thickness of the total intentionality of world we are moved to see that somethings disclosure, the appearing of something (genitive of manifestation), is as a result of worlds letting appear or worlds letting something come outside of itself into the open and thereby manifest to a wakeful mind (a dative of manifestation). Here it is the world that enables something to appear as being outside, before us in the open; this is appearing within the truth of the world. For Henry, world as the

185 self-exteriorization of the exteriority of `the outside, has perfect symmetry with temporal exstases (27; cf. also 199 ff.). In both cases of world and temporality, things, in their coming to appearing as coming into the world, are robbed of their inherent reality because the appearance is something foreign to them and in juxtaposition to their reality. In temporality things are slung outside of themselves in the extases of past and future so that the being, i.e., present being, exists only in its emptying self-exteriorization; there is no present, only the extases of past and future, retention and protention. The monist view that things come most properly to manifestation in the coming outside and being appearings of . . . to--- results in the incessant annihilation of things: on the one hand, through the ecstases depriving them of any actuality and, on the other hand, through the worlds enabling the manifestation of things to be their self-exteriorization. I do not think this latter critical position is necessary to Henrys basic position. According to Henry, intentionality and/or world require the loss of the actuality of things because things are substituted for by a representation of them, i.e., in their appearings. Appearings thus become intervening kinds of either mental entities or ontological anomalies. In fact, Henry occasionally so formulates his critique of the basic monist position that he appears to hold that the basic transcendental phenomenological position that being and manifesation are inseparable applies only to self-affections and to deny that it holds of the being of the world. Yet one can argue both that appearings are inseparable from things because they are the articulations of things and not some version of Scholastic species or Fregean senses and that this sense of manifestation, which is proper to that of the world and intentionality, is less basic and essentially different from the sense of manifestation of original non-reflexive selfconsciousness. We can honor the distinction between appearings, manifestation, and what appears, as well as the claim that in the case of original selfmanifestation this distinction does not obtain, without thereby transforming appearings into mere representations extrinsic to the being.5 For Henry, the original manifestation non-reflexive awareness is clearly of a completely different order than that of intentionality and/or world. As he later put it, the truth of the world is of a completely different order than the truth of life. Indeed, as we shall see, the truth of Christianity is of a completely different order than the truth of the world because its truth is the truth of life. Here we have something manifest not through an appearing or (worlds) lettingappear which is outside and different from the actual thing or reality; rather we have a self-appearing in which what appears, its appearings and its act of manifestation are all one; there is no outside, no referring, no distance. My self-experiencing of my life in the first-person, e.g., in the flow of affections, sensa, acts, etc., permits no distinction between what appears and its appearings. In this feeling/sensing there is no distance between what appears and that to which it appears and the appearing; they are all one.

186 2. Life as Affectivity and Self-Affection Although Henry describes and elucidates the original primal self-presence in terms best translated as affection, feeling, sensing, suffering, undergoing, we must resist the temptation to treat these as that of which we are conscious. For Henry it is not only the issue that I cannot have a pain without being conscious of it, but that there is no distance between the pain and the consciousness of it, no distance between the primal feeling/sensing and felt/sensed.6 The theme of affection and self-affectings is perhaps dramatically emphasized when Henry insists on self-affecting as flesh. The body as organ, e.g., of touching, is always aware of itself in its being aware of the world, the touched. And this is not merely the case of the awareness of the touching being on the verge of itself being touched (the right index finger touching the left, but aware of itself on the verge of being touched by the left index finger, the latter itself becoming the touching); but this very capacity to be on the verge is a self-feeling; feeling, touching, etc. is always a feeling oneself feeling, always a feeling of this capacity, the I-can. (The theme of flesh takes on important metaphorical sense in the theology; see below.) Furthermore, for Henry, the immanent self-awareness is not a mere quality of intentional acts but is always already also an affection. Indeed, the awareness of acts itself is an affection or being affected in the sense that they are not perceived but lived (nicht wahrgenommen, sondern erlebt as Husserl would put it). In consciously living we are sad, in pain, worried, apprehensive, striving, puzzled, etc. And we are such in our non-reflexive self-awareness: the way we are affectively is the way we are self-conscious, self-affecting, self-feeling. This original essential affective manifestation which is prior to anything of which we are aware is a feature of all acts and, of course, all feelings as intentional acts. This awareness, i.e., the affection or self-experiencing we suffer, of (this preposition should be crossed out in so far as it suggests an appearing of . . . to---) what we non-reflexively experience, e.g., an act, is not a result of our agency even if the act itself is the result of our agency. (I do not will that the act is self-manifesting as something in addition to my willing the act.) And it may not be understood as a temporal process in the sense that it has ecstatic temporal phases, i.e., present, not-yet, and past, as does the stream of consciousness; rather more like Husserls Lngsintentionalitt of the primal stream the self-presence is not in time because it always is, i.e., the selfmanifestation does not pass away or come to be, even though the phases come and go. Thus even though the affects constantly change, the original self-manifestation remains everlastingly the same. (That there is some sense of process is important for Henrys making equivalent the event of selfmanifestation with Lifes self-manifestation, and this latter with the Fathers generation of the Son. We will return to these matters below.)

187 A basic point is the passive genesis of the self-affectings. One, as it were, receives oneself through a donation which is an ongoing self-experiencing and self-manifestatation, a self-suffering and joy. This means that this self-aware and self-manifest self-ness or ipseity, as a receiving oneself, is a self-affection, an auto-affection, which is prior to and a condition for any hetero-affection as an impression coming from outside or transcendent to consciousness. Without this archaic passivity and self-affection or sensibility there could not be any object be it ever so humble as a mere impression, sensum, stimulus, hyle, etc. Here that which affects and that which is affected are the same and therefore there is nothing exterior or foreign to me in this self-affecting. It is the self which itself constitutes the content of its self-affection (see, e.g., 134). The self-affecting therefore must not be understood as something which brings about consciousness, as if there were not selfness and consciousness until the self affected itself and consciousness emerged out of an unconscious affect affecting another unconscious affect and this brought about consciousness. No. For Henry, self-affection is a paradoxical term in as much as the selfaffecting is already itself self-affected, already conscious, and what it affects is itself, is itself already conscious. Although, one sometimes gets the opposite impression in the course of Henrys analyses, it must be said that the unique and problematic completeness and absoluteness of immanence are not to be envisaged as existing independently of transcendence. For Henry transcendence is also a basic mode in which being reveals itself7 and subjectivity of course always has a life in the presence of transcendent being.8 The absolute life of immanence is always, but not merely the immanent, non-ecstatic self-revelation of the very act of transcendence.9 For Henry pure phenomenality has the structure and division according to the co-original dimensions of representation [intentionality/ reference] and life.10 For Henry, as we have noted, the analysis of the original self-manifestation requires that life becomes the ultimate category. The proper sense of life is not to be found in any Daseinsanalyse. Henry echoes a critique of Heidegger we find already in Sartre and heard in Germany today from Manfred Frank. According to Heidegger, only because the human as Dasein stands in a relation to the world and is defined through this relation is he related to himself and thereby has access to life. In such a view the living being is living by having a world and this relation is what mediates its relation to itself, its self-living. For Henry such a view is a fundamental theoretical murder of life. It robs us of our first-person immediate experience of life. On the other hand, what a regional ontology (such as that of Aristotle, Driesch, Husserl, Conrad-Martius, Scheler and Plessner) uncovers is the vitality of what lives not the lived living itself, not the Erleben. Of course, it may grasp as characteristic of bodies we experience the essential meaning of these bodies in terms of a self-relating, self-maintaining, self-moving, and self-

188 reproducing. But this feature of life for the observer, this essential meaning, is an empty intention; there is no intuitive filled intention to which the meaning corresponds (53 ff.). For Henry, grasping in the second- or third-person the original essential meaning of life, of vie/Leben (qua lpreuve de soi/Erleben), is by stipulation ruled out because vie/Leben is ruled to apply only to the experience in the first person of the stream of self-affections, presencings, etc.; Leben is confined to Erleben in the first-person. The second- and thirdperson empathic experiences (Husserls Einfhlung) always come up with an essential absence and emptiness; and they never could give me life unless I as living were already somehow connected with the others in a more basic apriori way than empathy. Therefore Husserls account, because the other is always transcendent and outside, never is an account of how we truly know the other, understood as self-experiencing. (Thus it would seem, oddly enough, a scandal for Henry that knowing the other is not knowing him/her in the firstperson; for Henry knowing the other is knowing him/her not in the second- or third-person but in the first-person! For this reader, the sense of alterity within the first-person, although basic to Henrys theological as well as social phenomenology, is difficult to sort out.) For Henry, we are with one another in a more basic way in our first-person experience than through the perception of bodies out there in the world that motivate a pairing so that over there we have an analogy with our first-person self-experience here now. Indeed, there are original pathic forms of being-with, forms of community, which, as a spiritual acoustic, are the condition for the community-formation of which Husserl writes. Not least of these are the ways of being with the dead, with God, with Christ; but also the way mothers are with their children, hypnotists with their subjects, and lovers with their beloveds.11 This position is stated in Cest moi, la vrit this way: Life does not found merely each of the terms between which the relation to the other is established. It founds the relation itself . . . . How does Life found this possibility for each of the Sons being with the other, their beingin-common? In so far as it itself is this being-in-common. (317) I will pass over this last theme of intersubjectivity because I believe it is not yet developed; clearly the theological transcendence in immanence, to which we will soon turn, provides a sense of otherness, or at least of depth, within the first-person; but for this reader the view that knowledge of the other as another I requires a knowledge of him/her in the first person is a stumbling block. But related is the discussion of how we know what is alive. What I miss in Henrys discussion is room for the category of soul or entelechy which accounts for how the I-can is inseparably connected to an It-can which may become Itmust and therefore I-cannot, i.e., for the various unconscious functionings of what we call life outside of and within the human body; it is also a powerful concept for elucidating the phenomenon of teleology, whether it is manifest in

189 various forms of development evident in third-person considerations or in the first-person experiences of infinite ideas as well as of the ubiquitous interplay of filled and empty intentions.12 In the case of an organism, whether ones own or that of another, may we not say that it has a future, a present and a past in the sense that its teleological nature requires that in its present actuality there is an actual fulfillment of its former future as well as a present retention of the achievements of its former presents and an anticipation of its future? And yet here there is no manifest reason to posit an Erleben in the organism itself. The stimulus that the plant receives and responds to, e.g., in heliotropism, is not manifestly felt, not a self-affection; there seems to be no phenomenological basis provided by the plant for the empathic positing of the immanence of selfaffection. Yet there is a kind of self-relation because the plant itself moves, holds sway over, and reproduces itself. That is, it is not as if the parts of the plant, i.e., the cells, genes, molecules, all do their work independently of one another and miraculously there results the whole any more than the lumber, mortar, cement, nails, screws, pipes, wires, etc. would all do their work and thereby a house would result. The elimination of the category of soul or entelechy creates a vacuum for reductionist mechanism. Or it compels Henry to affirm panpsychism (in the sense of where there is life in the common sense there is Erleben, a speculation which would seem quite foreign to Henrys strict phenomenological philosophy; or do we have the spiritual acoustic also with plants and organisms?). Or finally it consigns the realm of the organic to the non-living something that seems uncalled for and to come near the reductionism he rightfully criticizes.13 Various phenomenological thinkers (Scheler, Conrad-Martius, and Plessner) would argue that in Erleben there is an essential fulfillment of the defining features, e.g., self-relating, self-referring, self-identifying, etc. already hinted at but not actualized in the realm of the mere organic life because the selfreferring is still without a proper self. This would seem to be congenial with Henrys basic claims. Life is already analogical for Henry and it would not harm his position to erase the seemingly univocal claim; we will see that the divine life and its generation of the First-Born, Primal Son, is not in every respect identical with that of the transcendental Is to which they give birth. Thus for Henry a fortiori the proper sense of life is not to be found in biology which seems perfectly willing to acknowledge that for it the very notion of life, as something distinctive from the physics and chemistry to which it is reduced, is without any scientific or pragmatic merit (51-53). Rather the reality of life is to be found in what is most essential for phenomenology, i.e., that without which there would be no manifestations of . . . to---. For Henry, life is exemplarily non-reflexive lived experience, le vcu, or Erleben, and this is the deepest sense of being or to be (Sein). Modernity is able to be characterized as blind to life. The Galilean reduction of life to what is dead, to what is essentially worldly, but worldly as what is to

190 be quantified and controlled, is a pervasive illness, a madness, whose barbarism for Henry is of apocalyptic proportions. Technology, capitalist economy, Soviet Marxism, TV, the modern sense of work and labor, etc. all form ingredients of this lifeless megamachine (Lewis Mumfords, not Henrys term) which is hell-bent on the destruction of all life and humanity and denying the immanent life-force which creates it.14 3. The Essence and the Foundations of the Philosophy of Religion We may now turn to the themes of philosophy and phenomenology of religion as well as philosophical theology. There are several but intertwined procedures here: Henry finds it obligatory to interpret the themes of religion (a term which he rarely uses) only in terms of his interpretation of Christianity, even though he admits that the radical power we have to self-affect and exist as selves is not in our power (the major theme of this essay), but rather religions are the different ways of expressing this non-power which is inscribed in the passivity of my life . . . Living life as something that one has received is necessarily to experience an infinite respect in regard to oneself and in regard to something which is more than oneself. This is already religion.15 In the book we are studying he interprets Christianity within the context of his radical life-phenomenology. And he finds it singularly appropriate, although the reasons for this appropriateness are not always clear to this reader, to interpret or explicate radical life-phenomenology in terms of Christianity, foremost the Gospel of John. The reader at first might well think this to be rather illiberal; but my sense of the matter is that the patient student will be rewarded with not only a sumptuous feast of radical life-phenomenology, but a novel if also ancient appreciation of Christianity. Doubtless other religious traditions might be drawn into the conversation eventually; but to do so at the start is not necessary. It would be odd to fault a religious person, even a religious thinker, for having a specific religious tradition. Henrys theology may be contrasted with modern liberal theologies that aspire to speak from any and all perspectives; it may also be constrasted with the post-modern ones claiming that we cannot surmount our contingent perspectives but must continue to talk with the others even though in our hearts we know there is nothing to say. The non-reflexive self-manifesting realm of immanence or life has bestowed on it early the title of the essence and the absolute. In the 1963 work, The Essence of Manifestation, the essence refers to the realm of immanent selfmanifestation, presumably in part because it does what Wesen did for both Husserl and Heidegger: It heralded the necessity and invariant which philosophy must uncover; it also singled out the unique kind of manifestation of the

191 condition for the possibility of all manifestation. Similarly the absolute had its remote precedent in earlier idealist thinkers but perhaps foremost in Husserls absolute being of the realm of immanence. The unique manifestation of the essence which, because of the predominant standpoint of intentionality may be regarded as invisible or hidden, enables Henry to broach religious themes. In 1963 we find: immanence constitutes the most interior nature of the absolute, the absolute itself, its essence. This is why the absolute permits itself to be understood by starting from this hidden state or as that which maintains itself in this state; this is why No one has seen God, and finally why God is the hidden God.16 The initial reaction to this might well be that this is a very narrow place in which to do philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. For Henry this is the monist prejudice kicking in. Philosophy has long sought the parousia, the advent of the full presence of being, in ontology or in the true knowledge of being as such or the To Be of beings. It has done this through allegiance to representation or intentionality and failed to see that the self-appearance of the appearing and the self-manifestation of pure manifestation do not occur this way. Further, Henry believes that intentionality, knowledge, and the truth of the world are in principle not only inadequate but inappropriate for the truth of the divine which is the truth of life. The Parousia is not the fact of true knowledge; it is its presupposition, just as it is the presupposition of the non-true knowledge of natural consciousness which limits itself to a being. Because the presupposition of the true knowlege of philosophical consciousness and of the non-true knowledge of natural consciousness is the Parousia, this presupposition is not a foundation hidden behind the life of consciousness, it is conscious life itself as such. . .17 This reader has difficulty with Henrys claim that the original self-manifestation of ourselves to ourselves is a Parousia. The term typically means the fullness, the completion. Its sense is necessarily one that stands in contrast to what is empty and what is incomplete. It is a basic point of Henry that the endpoint and fullness for which knowledge, and ultimately philosophy, yearn is the essence or original self-manifestation of life. But that fullness involves contrasting it first with the sense of its emptiness with regard to intentionality and the worldly sense of fullness/emptiness as well as the transformation of the world into a relative emptiness. But it is only with the erasure of the senses of fullness and emptiness as they unfold in intentionality that we can get a sense of the essence. But what does Parousia now mean? Is it just as much emptiness (cf. sunyata) as parousia? Henrys early use of being clearly does not place him in the camp of the onto-theology critiqued by Heidegger and many others following in the wake

192 of Heidegger. Rather, Henry has proposed a phenomeno-theology or a theophenomenology. The true ontological structure is the attending to Being which is not an act of referring or intending; it is the original self-manifestation of Being which constitutes the essence of consciousness or lifes orginal selfaffecting.18 But this early appropriation of the received concept of Being eventually is supplanted by Life or the truth of Life, Henrys preferred way of talking about the non-reflective immanent self-awareness. Heideggers Sein is an absurd subordination of the truth of Life to that of the world. Jean-Luc Marion is praised by Henry for his critique of Heidegger and striving to point to God without Being. (198) Thus the hiddenness of the absolute and of life is the context for talking about God. Why is this not a capricious restraint in the way Sein is? Because the manifestation of Sein is not as fundamental as the essence; the latter is the absolute condition for all manifestation. But attached to this is a more basic consideration. The absolute essential realm, The Truth of Life, is not merely that which accomplishes all revelation, but in it it itself is revealed. Recall that for Henry the basic or primal manifestation is the self-affecting. Here the achievement, the sensed or affected and the sensing or affecting are all one. If we take this to be the basic structure of life we can say that life accomplishes a self-revelation, not a revealing in which the revealing is different from what is revealed and the manifestation is different from the manifested. In contrast, the revelation proper to the light of being and the world is a revelation from outside of something different from itself. (World, the Clearing, are different from that which they permit to appear; appearings are appearings of . . . to---; there is a distance between what appears and its appearings and that dative to which the appearings appear, [even if we do not hold with Henry that this is necessarily a destructive distance.]) For Henry, the divine, especially the God of Christianity who is revealed as Life Itself, must be the self-revealing. Why? Because anything else would be not only inadequate but inappropriate. It would be inadequate because this would mean that the divine would be mundane and an object of intentionality and available only through interpretive apprehension. It would be inappropriate because the divine would be essentially vulnerable to the destruction of being which characterizes the worldly manifestation wherein what reveals is not only separate from what is revealed and that dative of manifestation for which the revelation occurs, but also alienates what is revealed from itself and scatters it in temporality. Onto-theology is thus the murder of God. Therefore the divine, God, cannot be revealed through thinking or worldly experience which is always a revealing in which what is made manifest is different from the manifestation or what enables the manifestation or that to which the manifestation is made. Access to God understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to him is only suceptible of being produced there where this self-revelation happens and in the manner in which it does it. (39)

193 Thus because God is uniquely self-revealing God can only be manifest, be phenomenalized, in the phenomenalizing which is proper to him which is the phenomenalizing of the basic condition for any phenomenality whatsoever. Because only in life is there this phenomenalizing of phenomenality, God cannot be found in thinking or research. Rather God an only be found in that form of manifestation which is other than the realm of intentional or worldy disclosure, i.e., only the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality, which is the equivalent for Henry of non-reflexive self-awareness in life.19 And here Henry claims another equivalence, aspects of which we will come to know better later: wherever there is life there is the divine self-manifestation. Because God is life, we know God not in the knowledge of the world or on the basis of some form of knowledge, but only in life. (We will henceforth capitalize Life when we use it as the equivalent of the divine or God; but because of the thin line separating life and Life, I beg the readers indulgence at borderline cases.) Thus Henry maintains that the theological concept of revelation is essentially phenomenological. There is total symmetry if not identity between the phenomenological problematic of pure appearing, manifestation, etc. and Christianity. With the idea of a pure revelation of a revelation whose phenomenality is the phenomenalizing of phenomenality itself; of a absolute self-revelation that does without anything which would be different from its own phenomenological substance we are in the presence of that essence which Christianity places in the principle of all things. God is this pure revelation who reveals nothing other than himself. God reveals himself. (3637) Thus a revelation of God to humans cannot consist in the disclosure of some hidden content which would be foreign to the inner essence of humans and yet somehow transmitted to certain initiates. Similarly God is not something one sees in the world or confronts as an object over-against within the horizon of the world. Henry can enlist Johannine texts: I am not of this world (John 17: 14); My Kingdom is not of this world (John 18: 36). This is in part because revelation (and the essence of phenomenology) has to do with the phenomenality of phenomena, i.e., it has to do not with the things that are manifest but how things are given to us. The understanding of revelation as knowledge of the scriptures, or what the tradition passes down, and especially the scholarly understanding of the scriptures and tradition according to the latest theory, information, discovery, etc. is folly. This kind of knowledge, whether rooted in the truth of history or the truth of the world or of Being, is always tentative, revisable, corrigible, falsifiable. But the absolute truth of God is the Truth of Life. There is no scriptural text or interpretation, perhaps not even a dogma, that can promote this Truth of Life (17).20 I praise you, Father . . ., because you have hidden all this from the wise and clever and revealed it to the little ones (Matthew 11: 25); i.e., the pre-condition as well as the effect of revelation

194 is ones immediate awareness of oneself which permits itself to be explicated as awareness of ones being a child of God. (See section 7. below.) 4. Theology, Intentionality, and Faith This reader has difficulty resolving what seems to be a basic tension in some of Henrys formulations: Because intentionality does not grasp the essence Henry requires that immanence be full-blown intelligibility apart from the explicating intentional acts; and: the rich intelligibility of immanence is brought to light through the explicating intentional acts. Henry argues eloquently for the non-intentional, non-referential, non-reflexive form of manifestation and shows how this is more fundamental and the condition for the possibility of intentionality and the truth of the world. But at the same time the manifest nature of this realm is nothing without the intentional activity of reflection. Indeed it is not only essentially hidden and invisible but has remained anonymous for philosophy for most of its history. If the original self-manifestation is a fullness apart from and foreign to meaning, reference and intentionality, how is it that its disclosure requires reflection (i.e., intentionality and reference)? Once again: Henrys distinction between knowledge through intentionality and knowledge through auto-affection (the knowledge of life) is magnificentlty orchestrated. But are the latters features, e.g., as indubitable, as pathos, as self-affection, as a transcendental affectivity totally different from seeing, as immediately self-revealing without distance, as invisibility, etc. evident as such apart from a phenomenological reflection (intentionality)? Another way to put this is in more scholastic (Lonerganian) language. We can take from Henry the notion that original self-awareness is a self-affection, or as Husserl himself has put it, a primal sensing or feeling.21 In which case in our self-affecting each self and its acts are known prior to reflection sub ratione experti aut affectionis or under the formal aspect of the nonintentionally immediately experienced or self-affected. In order that our experience, self-affections, acts, evaluations, etc. be evident as such, they must be known sub ratione quidditatis, i.e., by meaning-making acts or Auffassungen which enable them to appear as such, i.e., as self-affections, acts, evaluations, etc. Prior to meaning-bestowing acts consciousness as the immediate primal sensing or self-affecting is knowledge not of the object but of the subject and its acts. And these are present not as a terminus ad quem but as a principium a quo; but even this immediate self-experiencing is not knowledge of these as such but merely self-affecting, i.e., self-experiencing sub ratione experti/affectionis awaiting reflective acts in order to become manifest as such, i.e., sub ratione quidditatis, or as informed with eid.22 In Phnomnologie matrielle, Henry seems to reject the Husserlian resolution that claims that there is an original reflective non-constituting (in

195 the worldly sense)23 intuition or Schauen of the eidos/eid immanent within the transcendental immanence which discloses itself in reflection as what before was given (sub ratione experti sed non quidditatis) in a self-affection or sensing prior to reflection. This is obviously not a strict identity relationship and there is only a looser sameness-recognition between the non-reflective and reflective. Further it ought not be compared to the horizonally determinable that becomes determinate (something Husserl himself occasionally does by way of analogy as in Hua III, 45); immediate self-awareness is not strictly speaking a horizonal knowing which is essentially intentional. Nor is it like a novel categorial intuition for such too is intentional and has to do with genuine beginnings, whereas immediate self-awareness has to do with the ineliminable but not articulated self-knowing which never is not there. If this position is not acceptable this reader fails to see what the source of Henrys descriptions and analyses is. Similarly in the theological discussions, on the one hand, Henry maintains that the ineluctable presupposition for understanding Christianitys teaching is its interpretation of life as essentially phenomenological. And he speaks of how, for the one who penetrates into the inner essence of life, the inner content of Christianity is able to illuminate with an overwhelming power (71). We thus see that the intentional life of the mind is a necessary condition for Christianity shedding light on life and it is a necessary condition as well for shedding light on the essence of life and on Christianitys superior grasping of this essence. (In passing, we may note that there is interpretation involved in Henrys renditions of both historical Christianity as well as The New Testament.) On the other hand, intentionality and the truth of the world are said to be foreign to the truth and essence of life. (See 71.) The truth of Life is autonomously realized by Life being lived. Thus we have: Christianity and philosophy must use intentionality to interpret life; but life is the parousia apart from any interpretation or intentional activity; indeed these are foreign to it. There is another basic issue here. The status of faith in Henry is not perfectly clear to this reader. Faith in the early Christian tradition was said to be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Its sense in this ancient definition is essentially tied to what in Henrys sense is worldly in so far as it is tied to empty intentions. But in another sense it is non-worldy in as much as faith is a complex sui generis way of filling an intention transcending the phenomenological sense of world without at the same time having the filling intuitions which comprise a robust sense of knowing.24 Thus there would seem to be a tension between pistis or faith and gnosis or the knowing occurring in the living of life. If we take Gnosis to be a passively received non-rational, non-worldy, revelatory self-knowledge inseparable from the knowledge of God, it would seem that Henrys theology would lean more to gnosis than pistis.25 We shall elaborate on this.

196 When Henry discusses faith within the context of his phenomenology of Christ and Christianity there is clearly a tension with the traditional sense of faith as an intentionality which makes present by hope and trust what is epistemically not present or evident. On Henryian principles this is an intentionality which expects that which is absent to one day come to light within the ecstatic intention of the world or being. But true (Henryian) faith is a mode of disclosure which is more radically opposed to seeing than is the traditional understanding. It is not some lesser form of knowing, not a substitute for seeing which remains absent, not an empty intention, as an expectation, incapable of itself to produce its content. Faith, according to Henry, does not belong to the domain of acts of consciousness but to self-affection or pathos, i.e., the living beings awareness that it has not itself given life to itself, i.e., awareness that it is not in its power to make itself a self, but rather that it is incessantly receiving itself and this power; this, according to the Henryian interpretation of Christianity, is the disclosure of divine Sonship. (See our discussion in section 7. below.) Thus we see that grace and not human works is the most fundamental feature of the human condition (242243).26 And we also see that this faith is not an empty intention but rather a fullness, indeed it is the steeped in the parousia of the absolute Lifes own certainty of living absolutely. (For faith see 108 ff., 195, 232 ff.; we shall later return to the question of how suffering and pain in the pathos of life is still a parousia.) Thus the life of faith is the faith of life or the fundamental self-affecting (which might also be named a proto-doxa or a transcendental trust)27 which founds everything else that comes to light, not merely as a basic stratum but as the very essence of manifestation. But for this reader, when Henry then states that faith is the revelation of the condition of divine Sonship,28 of the living beings being grasped in Lifes self-embrace (243), it remains unclear whether this faith emerges out of a phenomenological analysis or whether this analysis itself is a grace.

5. God and the Teleology of the Mind But what of another connected objection that a Husserlian must raise? It would seem that theology of a phenomenological sort cannot dispense with the minds worldliness. This is not only because of its view that being and manifestation are inseparable and that the appearings of things are not distorting intervening entities but the very manifestations of things; nor is it only because of its view that the parousia is not to be realized apart from the pursuit of infinite tasks; but furthermore, and inseparable from this latter consideration, also by reason of its teleology and the pervasive power of regulative ideals. Chief among these is the intention of the ideal of world. This world-transcending intending is the very condition of the intentionality of world and the things

197 within world. These intendings get articulated by such Husserlian considerations as the lure of the transcendence surpassing the transcendence of the world, i.e., the ideal-pole of the world, and the dynamism of the minds infinite desire to know, etc. In short, for the Husserlian, because the mind is pervaded by an eros for the divine, a sense of the divine which is bereft of every sense of the Good erases a basic phenomenological sense of the divine. Consider that the sense of Marions critique of God, where the word God is crossed out, does not mean that the concept of God must disappear but rather that the divine enters into the field of our thought only by rendering itself unthinkable there by excess, by saturating thought each time and forever in such a way that thought is obliged to critique itself.29 It would seem that this is still, in spite of the critique of Heideggers Sein as the necessary framework for any sense of God, still, a kind of (Platonic, Blondelian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian) ecstatic intentionality, as the condition, indeed, the very essence of the critique of idolatry. This is especially true if the critique is to have some phenomenological sense, and not be merely the critique of an idea of God from the standpoint of an abstract, empty Unthinkable garnished from a tradition. The traditional and/or the Thomist-Blondelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian removal of the divine from any form of thingliness and or being-ness is not decisive for Henry because of its allegiance to transcendence and intentionality. And he does not attempt to see the question of transcendence in a doctrinal context with which he himself ceteris paribus sides, i.e., the Thomist claims that after creation there are more entia but there is not more esse, and that God plus the world is not greater than God alone.30 Rather all such discussions, in so far as they seek the divine within ecstatic intentionality, become basically irrelevant for what is essential. Indeed, in Henry the very sense of idolatry switches from the collapsing of the divine into a being or inflating a being to the divine to a tension between the world and transcendental life. More fundamental and seemingly more perverse than the dialectical way the idol absorbs and displaces the excess of intentionality directed toward the divine is the way the manifestness of the world and intentionality occlude the manifestness of life. For theology this occlusion is of consequence only in so far as the truth of life is the truth of God. For Henry this equivalence cannot be established by the intentionality of the Good because such is essentially heterogeneous to the parousia of life as original self-manifestation. The problem posed by the teleology of consciousness is related to Henrys view of how will is subordinate to self-affection. And this is related to another case for the parousia which Henry builds: Self-affection, at bottom, is a kind of joy, and thus a parousia; it is the joy of sharing in the eternal Sonship. Let us briefly examine his case.In suffering ones selfness, indeed in this undergoing oneself as oneself, there is constituted what Henry calls ipseity, i.e., oneself

198 is given to oneself. This becoming of ipseity, the shining forth of self-presence, is the triumph of life and self-revelation. Therefore not only is life or the selfs actualization a suffering but it is also joy. This basic sense of Being or Life is the unity of suffering and joy. These are not to be understood as two preexisting separate tonalities but the intrinsic moments of self-manifestation. And all possible tonalities, all affective determinations, are themselves modes of these constitutive moments of suffering and joy.31 When Henry claims that this ongoing undergoing or suffering of oneself is not utterly without an affective tonality he is not simply referring to Befindlichkeit, i.e., how we always already find ourselves in the world. What he has in mind is neither a being in the world nor a finding oneself; it is rather the living of auto-affection, its ongoing self-affection. If affectivity and emotions are to be understood as necessarily involving implicit propositions about our being-in-the-world then we can readily see that for Henry the tonality of autoaffection is prior to our ecstatic, interpretive, pre-propositional being-in-theworld. There is no exteriority, no outside, no world in the pure auto-affection. Further, Henry insists it is essentially non-relational or irrelational; yet in the early work as well as in the later be believes he uncovers within Being/Life a reason to still speak of a relation.32 (We shall have occasion to return to this.) Henrys point here is a departure from other phenomenological axiological theories. He (implicitly) rejects an axiology (such as Husserls standard early view) which holds that our affective life is founded on our worldly perception.33 Furthermore, feelings, which he names phenomenalizations of the original self-affectings,34 are not to be explained as a result of the transcendent noema or that which is revealed through the feelings, e.g., hate as a result of the quasi-causal or motivational force of the hateful object. Feelings, furthermore, differ in themselves before differing from the objects to which they refer. It is by itself that the feeling is affected in its affectivity in what makes it a feeling; it is itself which it reveals, itself and nothing else.35 Thus the tonalities of the original self-affectings, the tonalities of the moments of suffering and joy as well as the derived tonalities, are not to be understood as tied necessarily to the world and the objects in the world. Is Henry denying anything like the implicit propositional (Husserl: positiontaking) character of our affective life? Is he denying anything like Befindlichkeit, i.e., that there are affective tonalities inseparably tied up to the world and what is therein revealed? Even if we grant the difficult claim that there are deepstratum tonalities which have to do with the attainment of, and flight from, life and selfness (themes stressed also in the works on barbarism and psychoanalysis), in general it would seem that the tonalities of auto-affection refer less to an original separated absolute life, than to the first-person self-affection which is ineluctably suffused with its Befindlichkeit. Thus whereas any affect can be illuminated by the intentional reference to the world, the affect, e.g., joy, can be considered purely in itelf in its purely pathic modality as suffusing pre-reflective

199 self-awareness. As such it is an absolute self-experience which is its own content. As such, Henry maintains, it bears in itself the absolute essence of life, being nothing but another mode of this absolute life. This would seem to be further buttressed by the consideration that the affect, e.g., pain or joy, which is always necessarily a first-person experiencing of the affect, might well involve an error about its cause or, e.g., there might be an error about joys appropriateness in regard to the events of the world, or because of the complexity of the situation I might not really be experiencing what I thoughtlessly called joy. But there can be no doubt about the experiencing, indeed the self-experiencing, of the affect which I confusedly called joy.36 The basic question here for Henry is this: Granted that the revelation of the self-affection or feeling to itself is at the same time a revelation of the object to which it is (intentionally) related, is the former essentially co-determined by the latter? Henrys position is clearly that it is the self-affection itself which reveals itself and nothing else and that to exhaust ones description by attributing to the feeling the power of relating itself to the specific object is to forget the power of revelation peculiar to self-affection or affectivity itself. But as to the question just raised, he wants to affirm that the determination and disclosure of the object are less fundamental than affectivity. Affectivity as self-affection constitutes the foundation of all possible affection in general.37 In this sense the answer to the question is, No. What this means is that self-affection is the foundation of all action, all will by which Henry clearly means the power of action, fiat, deciding, choosing, resolving, etc. Will is born on the crest of the wave of the original self-affectings; it comes into being on the basis of self-affections. Will cannot change or bring into being self-affection because the latter is the source of the original capacity of self-determination of the self (see below, section 7). Will and action are radically impotent in regard to their foundation in self-affection; indeed selfaffection essentially eludes will as an object in any sense. What is willed is always outside of the will, always transcendent in some sense; yet self-affection is immanent within will and bears it as the very possibility of will.38 Thus there is a radical contingency and impotence at the heart of being as founded in selfaffection. Everything which we are able to do is without importance, at least with regard to what is essential, namely our interior transformation and regeneration. . .39 Even in the early 1963 writing Henry sees here the theological themes of predestination and grace. The inability of assuring oneself of ones salvation is ultimately not a matter of the relation of ones action to ones being, e.g., developing habits, getting rid of vices, but rather it is a matter of the internal structure of ones being. As selves we are originally passive and impotent in regard to our being selves.40 Thus in regard to the phenomenological philosophies of religion there are interesting parallels. For Husserl too there is something more basic than our

200 acts of will, our actions, and more basic even than our fleeting feelings or affections. These are all derived and work in tandem with the occurrent worldly experiences to determine how and why we act the way we do. But these are all founded on a basic dimension, the latent will, that coincides with the divine and what is most basic within us.41 But for Husserl (and, e.g., Scheler and Blondel) what we have proper and immediate evidence for is the ongoing flux and phases of experience which are seen to always have an infinite ecstatic horizon: Life is characterized by the insufficiency of the filled intentions and the inadequacy of the promise of our empty intentions with their fulfillments. Husserl notes that the world has in juxtaposition to the necessary ideal of an increase [in value] in infinitum an infinite lack (F I 24, 149). It is no accident that the human . . . never arrives at satisfaction. . . Hua XV, 404.) And this serves as a pointer to an immanent divine will. The human will must align itself with the divine will which is at once more intimate than ones most interior and more transcendent than ones highest goal. But for Henry these claims and the experiences which give rise to them only point to the emptiness of the world and a demonstration that there can be no joy or wisdom in the realm of transcendence. Further, for such philosophical theologians of an infinite intentionality,42 this latent or basic nisus, dynamism, teleology, etc. which launches the spirit beyond the transcendence of the transcendence of the world is still something with which we must coincide by renouncing our own will. (Cf., e.g., Hua XV, 378381.) For Henry, such a theological theme is fundamentally askew because what is at stake is retrieving our transcendental Sonship and realizing we are not of this world, not because our destiny transcends the worlds transcendence but because all transcendence is ontologically inane. But Husserl (and, e.g., Blondel) can echo what is basic for Henry: For them also there is a fundamental passivity in the receiving of this basic will and the way it informs ineluctably the flux of our life. As such this view also affirms some sense of grace as prior to and foundational of all agency.43 And although these philosophies, in contrast to Henry, affirm a transcendent good surpassing the transcendence of the world and which is the essential transcendence and therefore unachievable parousia,44 they also, like Henry, affirm a transcendence in immanence of which we are inclined to be unmindful. (We will return to this in section 7. below.)

6. Fundamental Theology Fundamental theology in Christianity traditionally sought motives for belief in God and in a divine revelation. Typically the issue centered around, on the one hand, the requirement to let God be God, i.e., to acknowledge that faith and salvation are a matter of grace. To posit a kinship with God, an innate idea

201 or a natural desire for God, may be seen to reduce Gods transcendence to finite folly. On the other hand, there was also the constellation of beliefs that grace does not destroy but elevates by supplementing nature; and revelation as Good News could only be welcomed by humans because at some deep level it answered the fundamental desire of the heart or saturated the ecstatic intentionality beyond being or beings. In the latter case we see that fundamental theology is connected to our prior theme of the minds teleology. Henry does not fit easily into this traditional spectrum. He posits indeed a radical kinship of humanity with God, i.e., humans are essentially Sons of God (see section 7 below). But at the same time the issue remains unclear whether the revelation of this kinship is exclusively Gods own doing, even though perhaps Henrys radical life-phenomenology may serve as a propadeutic; or whether the kinship is simply transcendental phenomenology brought to a deeper level. In some discussions Henry draws near to the fundamental theological epistemological issue of the motivation for faith and how one recognizes the divine as the divine in a revelation. This, of course, is not the issue of proofs of the existence of God. (See 194 ff.) These for Henry are a kind of absurdity in so far as they place the divine before judicial powers and declare that the divine, if it be, must announce itself in accord with the expectations and presuppositions of the judges. Here God as a hypothesis is placed before the mind as something strange and an anomaly in our modes of reference, intentionality, and conceptuality. If God exists then he must fit within this schema and the pre-established conditions. But the existence of the referent of God as a concept, like the existence of the referent of I, would not be possible if we did not have first of all a primal manifestation which was prior to the reference and had nothing to do with our intellectual understanding or sense perception. Thus when Anselm, subsequent to his proof asks his soul, if you have found God why do you not feel what you have found? Why, Lord, does my soul not feel then that it has found you? Henry claims that the answer is because the divine is manifest only in the living of life and never through a kind of worldly intentionality. Hiddenness and invisibility characterizes the essence and the divine, because they characterize the realm of immanence or immediate non-reflexive self-consciousness. The invisible is thus given a positive character: it both makes the immanence of the essence possible and determines the essence of immanence; the power of the kind of revelation of immediate self-experience is the power of night. (See for all this 194 ff.)45 The essential invisibility of God which is inseparable from the invisibility of the essence is not the invisibility of something beyond our range of vision or sphere of intellectual comprehension. Nor is it the invisibility of a being who chooses to hide. It is the invisibility characteristic of what is immediately nonintentionally self-manifesting.46 Meister Eckhart has it right: Seeking God as

202 something foreign to the soul and life, something to be achieved by knowing what is outside of us, is not to find God. Life flows unmediated from God into the soul. What is life? Gods Wesen, Gods being, is my life (Eckhart). But life is not a being, not even a god; and so God is not something to be known. The greatest pleasure of the spirit is in the nothingness of its archetype.47 Once again, anything whatsoever in order to be manifest, has as the condition of its manifestation, the self-awareness, self-suffering of transcendental life. This primal revelation as the apriori transcendental condition of whatever appears is also the primal revelation of God. Therefore the proof for the existence of God, like the proof for the existence of the I and inseparable from it for Henry must always presuppose a prior familiarity and immediacy of experience. Indeed, the classical proof for the existence of God involves the presumption that every mode of manifestation is worldly, i.e., through exteriority and intentionality, and that God is foreign to the original self-experience of life and must therefore be made manifest in exteriority and intentionality (193 ff.) But, we may here return to our earlier remarks on God, teleology, and Bonum and ask: If the divine is not connected with the fulfillment of the hearts desire, which at least provides a condition for self-deception and idolatry, what is there about the original self-experiencing of life which links or identifies it with the divine? Furthermore, granted the ineluctable undeniable selfmanifesting of life, and granting that the divine must be self-manifesting, is the Christian explication of life merely a logical fit or phenomenological achievement? If insight or recognition of the divine as the divine, e.g., as the answer to basic questions about the ultimate meaning of life, is often understood as a kind of (filling) intentional act, what is the nature of the recognition in Henrys theology where such a questioning and filling are necessarily a transcendental illusion because tied to intentionality and the world? Is it a grace which permits us to see this fit or the fittingness of this (Henrys) explication? What if one finds other fits or other explications? Are they equally legitimate? or are they perverse? or logically false? (One thinks especially of Shankara in conjunction with this matter because in many ways he foreshadows Henry in writing a theology centered around what Henry calls the essence.)48 Of course Henry would caution that the desire to fit the divine to Bonum and the heart or the will is natural because the failure to appreciate the unique hiddenness and absence of the revelation of life is due to a kind of transcendental forgetfulness this perhaps is as close as Henry gets to original sin. And it is this forgetfulness and privileging of transcendence and the world which have sustained the illusory and pathological aspect of religion. Thus the revelation of life is not to be dismissed because it does not have properties like gods or a Supreme Being; these are all expressions of the darkness of the truth of the world. And finally he would ask, what does it mean to hear the voice of God, to recognize the truth of God in someone representing Him to you face to face? What does it mean to recognize the word of God in Scriptures described as the

203 Word of God? His answer is that it is not the word of scriptures which teaches us to understand the word of Life. Rather it is the word of Life, making of us at each instant children of God, which reveals, in its own truth, the truth to which the word of Scriptures make reference. The one who hears this word of life knows that it speaks truly in as much as there is self-heard in it the word which installs one in life.49 In short it is not the word of God which renders the word of Life but the word of Life which renders the word read or heard the word of God. But is this to say that the word of life enables us to take the word of scriptures as the word of God? Is life (or Life) here functioning as a mode of intentionality, a mode of Auffassung founded in passive-synthesis, enabling the understanding of scriptures? I do not find a direct treatment of the issue. Henrys prima facie answer is a phenomenological explication of the Gospel of Johns No one comes to the Father except through me (John 6:44): As the Son only reveals himself in the self-revelation of the Father and while the Father reveals himself only in the self-revelation of the Son, the path to Christ, i.e., to divine revelation, can only be the repetition of the primal-, or archtranscendental birth of the Son in the bosom of the Father. For Henry this is knowing the process of the self-generation of the Life which has generated it in its condition of First Living (see 8689). We will look at this (in section 7. below) in more detail. But what is most astonishing is that for Henry all this is a way of talking about the first-person experience of life in its being non-reflexively lived. Crucial throughout is that the revelation cannot be heteronomy in the sense of having its source in the world and exteriority; rather it must be heteronomous to this heteronomy. Nor can it be the autonomy of insight and third-person evidence arising from the world and exteriority; that, as knowledge, is not autonomous enough and comes too late. It cannot be anything less, and, more surprisingly, it seems that it cannot be anything more, than the first-person living of life, and this may be seen as what the the Father generates in generating life in its condition of the arch-Son and Christ as the First Living. But note that this does not mean there is a separate experience of the divine, i.e., of the divine. There is surely no experience of a categorial realm called the divine. As for Husserl, the divine is not a Wesen or an eidos. Such experiences take place within the world or within being. God is not part of the world and is beyond being. As the primal manifestation is not a manifestation of . . . (genitive of manifestation) to . . . (dative of manifestation) so the divine is not something manifest in its being contrasted with anything else. It is not something to which intentionality has access, even if one frames it as beyond the world and beyond being. God is beyond and without being in the sense that the realm of immanence is without and beyond being.

204 But if this is to have some philosophical phenomenological sense it means that this word of life, understood as the passive self-affecting, i.e., as the selfconsciousness making the reference of the first-person pronoun possible, is the sufficient condition for the revelation. In order to see why this is not quite right for Henry we must enter into the heart of Henrys phenomenology of the Christ. When one listens to the word of Life, first person awareness of life must be enlarged to contain lifes essential word or self-ness (ipseity), the Eternal Word.

7. Divine Sonship and Transcendental Life As is now evident Henrys theology is emphatically immanent and we shall see that, to speak with Husserl, there is a kind of transcendence in the immanence (256)50. The word of life in the natural attitude is transformed into the Eternal Word of Life of the transcendental attitude. And as in the more classical theologies the task is transcending the transcendence of the world so in Henryian theology the task is retro- or intro-scending, deepening, or immanentizing the immanence. Henrys analyses of birth and the gift of life are means for understanding how immanence has a kind of transcendence within it. For Henry, we understand birth best as the coming not into the world but into life, i.e., into self-affection. Recall that a joy, for example, has the content of joy, that worldly event in regard to which I am joyful. Yet primal self-suffering, life itself as the non-reflexive joy-experiencing, produces the content of its affection, the content that it itself is. Lifes engendering the content is a self-donation which is also a self-revelation, i.e., the original transcendental pathos. Even though self-affecting is a self-suffering and self-receiving, and therefore is not my doing, i.e., not in the realm of my egological powers, still it is happening. For Henry there is here a theological therefore: therefore it is Lifes selfgeneration. It is this generation by Life of itself by itself that Henry designates as the strong sense of self-affection. In the strong self-affecting I am given to myself independent of any agency on my part whereas in the weak sense of self-affection I am present to and constitutive of myself on the basis of some agency of mine. The former is strong because it is not suffered or received by Life but effected by Life in Lifes selfing or self-affection. This strong sense of auto-affection is that of the absolute phenomenological life, i.e., Life, and belongs only to it. Life as the realm of passive genesis (and non-intentional synthesis) is not an achievement of the I, but rather I, self, etc. emerge out of this. Life as my elemental self-awareness is a self-affection, an auto-affection which is heteroeffected, not from the heteros of the world but from within. More basic than the I is the autos out of which the I emerges: cogito ergo cogitor. More basic

205 than life as my self-affecting is Life as the effecting of my self-affecting. The power to auto-affect life belongs to God (135). Why does Henry say this? Qua phenomenologist he only experiences the suffering and passivity of life, i.e., the effect, the auto-affection that he claims is Gods effecting; he does not experience Gods effecting the auto-affection of life. Why he holds this seems to be twofold. First there is the argument from symmetry between (and seeming equivalence of) Gods self-revelation and the minds non-reflexive self-manifestation: God/Life/mind cannot be revealed by anything less or other than itself. But there is also the insight emergent from penetrating into life and discovering Christianitys power to illuminate its transcendence in immanence. (See section 3. above.) The strong sense of self-affection is one in which Life on its own gives itself to itself; it is within the power of Life and in its power alone to selfdonate itself to itself. [Henry seems to ascribe to the divine a kind of causa sui and ens a se (aseity) status. See sections 910 below.] The strong autoaffection results in me being given to, receiving, myself. Henry nicely develops Husserls notion of how this original sense of I myself involves having myself. Through the original passive genesis I experience my original possibility, foremost in retention and protention. Following Husserl,51 he calls this I-can, i.e., I have the lived original power to act, i.e., I experience in an elemental way myself with capacity, e.g., I can recall, imagine, move, act, reflect, interpret, etc. The weak sense of self-affection is the actuation of the original capacity that one has but has not given to one self but which is given in the strong self-affection. This actuation is the beginning of the transcendental I as an agent of manifestation; it is also the origin of the I of agency. Again, one may think of this original selfactuation and self-formation of ones self-having as a consequence of and actuation of the I-can emergent out of self-affection. Prior to my proper selfinvolving, self-qualifying, self-reflexive acts where I am both nominative and accusative of the agency,52 the subject and object, in self-affection I am in a more elementary way the one who both is the affected as well as the affecting, the object or content and subject of this affection. As Husserl says (pace Henry), prior to any form of self-perception, self-reference, there is an unreflective I-life or consciousness for which, as Henry rightly says, the agent-I is in no way responsible (see Hua IV, 248). For Henry, in the strong sense of self-affecting the divine is the agent and nominative and we are constituted and accusative; in the weak sense of self-affecting we are, in some sense, (constituted and derivative) agents and nominatives as well as accusatives of our own agency. This last point needs to be spelled out. This strong self-creating self-affection, in which I am passively bequeathed to myself by myself, i.e., by myself as not yet the I of manifestation and agency, is a contingent reception or accepting of myself wolle-nolle, i.e., it is not something that has to happen nor does the I as source of agency and action have the least power to bring it about.53 This accepting of myself from myself as passive self-genesis, Henry holds to be

206 the accusative to Lifes effecting. What Life effects is the self-affecting of itself which as the exemplary selfness or ipseity is the condition for my selfness. At this level, the self (Moi) as generated cannot refer to itself in the nominative but only in the accusative (171). From this perspective, (and this reader has great difficulty seeing Henrys move here as still a transcendental phenomenological claim), I am a me and not yet an I.54 Thus I am an accusative of Life before and as the necessary condition for my being a nominative, i.e., a source of self-referring. And that before does not involve a temporal past sequence because my self-affection is an incessant self-experiencing and self-suffering and in the course of this selfundergoing my self is generated.55 And even prior to the achievements of I as agent of manifestation and action I am already individuated.56 This selfindividuating pre-egological self-affection is acknowledged by Henry to be a form of temporality. But the attaining by which the ego attains itself in itself is that by which absolute life originally succeeds in itself. In the auto-temporalization of its auto-pathic affection life is experienced (sprouve) in its essential ipseity as this singular self which is the I myself to which the ego ought to be an ego. Thereby is achieved the birth of the transcendental ego, and what we here wish to underline, is that this achievement is an absolute immanence which is that of life.57 Absolute Life is originally experienced by me in the ipseity or self-ness which is my original self-affecting consciousness. (The sense in which this primal self is I, whether primal-I or not, is problematic; it surely does not have, because it is prior to, the sense of I that I achieve in first-person utterances, it does not achieve oneself as oneself.) Generated as a singular self-luminous self in Lifes self-engendering I am transcendentally born. And in as much as this primal-generation is only a mode of self-generation of absolute life which is not born, I am unborn.58 But I, as the I of capacities, the I of I can, and eventually the I of acts and responsibilities, have not brought myself into this condition of experiencing or undergoing myself. I witness or suffer pre-preflexively myselfs ongoing emergent self-manifestation through self-affections without being the source of this manifestation. I am given to myself without this donation depending on me in any way. Thus my self-affecting is only through the absolute Life effecting a self-affecting in me. Again, this effecting of a self-affecting in me which is my transcendental birth has as its eternal precondition absolute Lifes coming to itself. Henry names this the divine lifes self-donation and self-revelation. The self only auto-affects in as much as absolute Life auto-affects in it. (136) The distinction between strong self-affection and weak self-affection, between, on the one hand, my passivity and receptivity of ipseity in the

207 stream of self-affections which effect the self-affection which makes me me, and not yet I, and, on the other hand, my actuation of this original I-can by self-qualifying and character-forming I-me acts (Husserl) is the phenomenological center for Henrys Christian theological explication. But the justification for the move from the weak self-affection to God as the source of the strong self-affection is not evident phenomenologically. It would seem to be, although Henry never puts it this way, a faith-informed taking-as, an intentional act, which enables this explication. Although this is a possbile interpretation, it disrupts the purely philosophical explication from within the realm of immanence. Nevertheless for Henry this is a perfectly natural move because for the one who penetrates into the immanent essence of life the power of Christianity to illuminate the depths or immanence of life is evident. (71) Thus Henry finds the Christian doctrine of God as a trinity (or at least a dyad) able to illuminate the depths of Life. Before we turn to this illumination we must note that although all humans are transcendentally born, most are afflicted with a transcendental illusion and must be reborn. That is, they are caught in the truth of the world and seek therein their identity and salvation. (See section 8. below.) In actuality their essential selfness is a participation in Lifes own self-affection and ipseity. Divine Life is the Life that self-affects itself absolutely, i.e., it does not suffer its self-affection, but rather it itself achieves it. (Cf. our discussion above in section 3 of divine self-revelation.) Henry holds that Life or the Father has ipseity through the self-affection which is the Son; the Father, therefore, considered abstractly, is a part of a whole (perhaps best understood as a Husserlian abstract moment, not a piece) and therefore is not yet self, not yet ipseity, and a fortiori not yet I in any sense. There would be no ipseity, no self-affection were it not for Lifes own enacted, not suffered, self-affection. This essential ipseity is called the First Living or the Christ or the eternal Son or the Primal Son, whereas all other forms of transcendental life must stem from being born of this life of the First Living. The Christ or the Eternal Son is the selfness effected through the active, strong, self-affecting of Life itself. And the selfness of the born transcendental I, the selfness of any life (without the capitals) is itself selfness only through the original selfness of Lifes own active strong-self-affecting. That is, my endured/received ipseity emergent from my passive self-affecting is possible only through the active strong effected self-effecting of Life. This ipseity of Life, the eternal Son, is also named the pathic flesh and it is is what binds Life to itself and binds me to myself in such a way that I am and am able to be that which I am (146). It is not so much that Christ is at first the medium between man and God but He rather is the medium between each self and itself, the relation to the self which permits each self or me to be a self or accusative of Life (147). In a rich interpretation of the parable of the shepherd and the sheep (I am the door of the sheep: who enters by me will be saved, and will go in and out

208 and find pasture; John 10:9). Henry claims that no self is possible that would not have as its phenomenological substance, as its flesh,59 the phenomenological substance and flesh of the Primal Son (147). Christ is seen to be the transcendental condition for the self-referentiality out of which the me becomes an I, an agent of disclosure and action. Because I am myself only through the living flesh of Christ, I am not my own flesh; I am not the door and source of the nourishment, the grass of the pasture; I am not that wherein the transcendental ipseity is grounded; rather, Christ is all this. And this same flesh is the door, the entrance, not merely to the one transcendental I which I am, but to the totality of living transcendental Is. I have access then to another transcendental I only by going through that original ipseity which relates the I to itself in that it makes a self out of it. It is impossible to touch flesh unless one goes through an original Flesh that by reason of its essential ipseity gives to this flesh this feeling itself and experiencing itself. It is impossible to touch this flesh without touching that other flesh that has made flesh of him. It is impossible to strike another without striking Christ (148).

8. Transcendental Illusion and Transcendence in Immanence Jesus question to his disciples, Who do people say that I am? is thus answered in the following way by Henry: The Eternal Son made flesh is at once the necessary condition for selfness; but it is also the scandalous worldly manifestation of what is essentially unworldly and hidden; it is also the revelation that access to Christ is excluded as long as the human understands himself as a being of this world (119); and, finally, it would seem that it is also a making evident that the deeper sense of the visible is the invisible flesh of Christ, that the truth of the world is to be transformed into the hidden flesh of Christ.60 For Christianity one is living, one is a transcendental I, only as son of God. The relation of Life to the living I is the relation of the absolute Before to the transcendental I; it can never be broken without ipseity being destroyed. The relation of the transcendental I to the absolute Before is not essentially reciprocal; the former cannot exist without the latter, but the latter is essentially independent of the former. The self-generation of Life results in the ipseity by which all other selfness is effected. Henry can draw upon both Johannine as well as Pauline texts in support of his position. The transcendental illusion occasions the need for a retrieval of ones transcendental birth, i.e., a rebirth. Christian life is the reversal by which one lives no longer from out of the truth of the world but out of the Truth of Life. (See especially chapters 810.) Everyone who has come into the world is born of the invisible eternal Life and Light of the Son. And the light which they are is not the light of the world nor is it accepted by the world; but neither has the

209 world extinguished it. But all must be reborn because of their forgetfulness of the essence. The forgetfulness is inseparably a lostness in the world. What the world means is the evangelical sense as illuminated by radical lifephenomenology; but at the same time the unfolding of this sense of life and the world are inseparable from Henrys reading of the New Testament, especially the Gospel of John. The transcendental illusion therefore is not merely the forgetfulness involved in ones being lost in the world; it is the unmindfulness of ones Sonship. One way of grasping this is through Henrys analyses of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount where we find, once again, a case for immanence as the parousia. What [each] Beatitude celebrates and blesses is the ultimate metaphysical situation which wills that in each form of life, even in the most unfortunate, there is accomplished the essence of absolute Life, its self-donation according to the structure of suffering in which it arrives to itself in its pathic embrace. (257258) The Beatitudes curses as well as the blessings point out the relation between the particular form of life and absolute Life. In particular the woes (e.g., Luke 6: 2425) highlight the transcendental illusion of one who is unmindful of his Sonship, i.e., enjoys his life as if it were not a gift and as if its source were to be found in his autonomy; that is, as if the only form of self-affection were the weaker form. Henry singles out wealth and eroticism as possibilities for this transcendental illusion. In both cases the person may succumb to the temptation to believe that the wealth/pleasure is not a gift from a transcendent (in immanence) source but rather due to himself and his own resources. Such a giving is the transcendence present in every form of immanence, a transcendence which has nothing to do with exteriority to oneself; that each self-affection, each suffering of oneself, is a possibility, on the one hand, to flee oneself by experiencing life as happening from without or as a result of ones own agency or, on the other hand, to experience ones very ipseity in all its tonalities as a gracious effect and thereby to liberate oneself to ones true identity as Son. Behind the paradox of the Beatitudes, i.e., that the self-affections of pleasure and well-being are cursed and the self-affections of humiliation and pain are blessed, there is to be found a secret: Both suffering and joy are apodictically experienced and therefore inseparable from the Life of the absolute or God; but the transcendental life of humans is not consubstantial with this life; and only if the apodictic self-affection is liberated from its transcendental illusion does the ineluctable and indubitable self-affection of joy and suffering bear the mark of unity with the divine Life. (See 256 ff.) Perhaps we can say that Henrys theory of self-awareness as self-affection is a celebration of pathos within pure immanence; but in so far as the person is so tied to the world that

210 he is drawn toward being unmindful of the transcendental sonship the doctrine shifts to one of worldly apatheia. Although, as we have seen, the Platonic-Augustinian themes of a theology tied to infinite desire, absence, and emptiness at the core of human existence are banned because of their commitment to transcendence, it is at this point that these ancient theological themes surface in Henry. Whereas for the PlatonicAugustinian tradition the hunger for wordly goods was at bottom a natural desire for God as the ultimate telos of the human heart, the goods themselves, even the non-worldly good which is oneself or ones soul, are hierarchical ciphers for the goodness and beauty which God is. (Augustine: Your God is not heaven or earth or any other body. . . But your God is for you too the life of your life.61) God is thus both the whence and whither of human life. Henry, on the other hand is closer to Plotinus: The Whence is the better; the Whither is less good: the Whither is not of the quality of the Whence-andWhither, and the Whence-and Whither is not of the quality of the Whence alone.62 The divine Life as the source of the strong self-affection out of which emerges the ego with its capacities is the Johannine source of eternal living water from which Jesus immediately drinks and gives to drink. (John 4: 13, 3234) Every ego who experiences himself in an abiding transcendental illusion as the source of all his capacities and feelings also experiences a terrifying lack, emptiness, and rupture (259). For such the yoke of life is heavy. It is only the recognition that ones life is born by and a result of the self-donation of absolute Life which can make this burden light. Such a recognition is like the discovery of ones buoyancy by one who despairingly believes that he can stay afloat only by thrashing about with all his might. But, as we have noted, for Henry the source of this recognition is not easy to determine. According to Henrys principles, on the one hand, it could not easily be a seeing-as derived from, e.g., reading Henry; but nowhere is it clearly stated that it would have to be the gift itself of divine Lifes selfaffection. But he does play with the idea that it is like the feeling of the one cursed, the one for whom it would have been better not to be born; for such this feeling of being cursed is not something the ego gives to itself, but is something suffered. Thus the ancient theme of the restlessness of the heart still finds its way into his thought.63 We have seen that the parousia of original self-manifestation is not initially appreciated by the one caught in the primacy of being and/or the world or what Henry calls the transcendental illusion, which is forgetfulness of the constitutive transcendence in immanence or ones condition as Son. (256 ff.) This is not a transcendence of exteriority but a transcendence in all immanent modes of life. The restlessness of the heart of classical theology stems from searching for the parousia in intentionality, in the exteriority of the transcendence of the world. The Beatitudes show that there is a parousia possible even in all of life because both suffering and joy are basic features of

211 Lifes original self-affection.64 Henry seems to say that because all needs properly seen are needs of the self, and the needing of the self is at its basic level a gift as well as the need and suffering of the absolute, all experience of suffering and pain is a basis of joy. For Henry to say that the infinite desire and restlessness of the heart as frames of intentional acts are alien to the truth of life requires demonstrating that with the insight into the truth of life and the transcendence in immanence the restlessness is eliminated. For Henry this is only possible by his positing the identity of the God of Christianity with the truth of life as construed by Henry. But assuming there is this stilling of the heart, which description best accounts for it? Is it the experienced (and therefore phenomenologically evident) graciousness of Lifes gift of a transcendental re-birth, or is it rather because of the act of faith which transposes the referent of the empty intention of the particular truth of the world which Husserl calls the truth of the will,65 i.e., the infinite will of the Good corresponding to the unique individual, to the Henryian explication of the truth of life in terms of the Gospel of John? We may note, however, that for Husserl the basic latent will (cf. Blondels willing will) that is there from the start most properly grasps itself when it realizes that it is not fulfilled primarily through the transcendence of what it meets in the world. But such grasping itself is only possible because of its prior familiarity with itself, a prior self-affection, at this most basic level. For Husserl too, the truth of will is a discovery of an original constitutive self-affecting. And, seemingly connected to this position, when Husserl speaks of the heart of religion lying in a drive or instinct of God, he claims that prayer therefore must be directed not outwards but within to the immanence of God within consciousness. He does not discuss the nature of this turn within except to say that it is not something private and is in a way parallel to the phenomenological turn within (E III 9, 22a-22b.)66 If one must think of such intentional turnings within as forms of world involvement, as is the case for Henry, then it would seem that prayer and the true self-gathering of oneself would be impossible. Thus a basic question is whether Henrys descriptions of the knowledge of life as a mode of spirituality require such forms of intentionality, even though his theory would exclude them. Is the basic non-reflexive living through of life all that is necessary, or is there not a mode of self-reference and selfdirectedness required both for the explication as well as the authentic living of this life, one that is neither an active intending nor the sheer simple living of life? Must there not be a kind of meditative attunement to the phenomenologicaltheological sense of ones passivity? A mindfulness that lets be, is greateful for, and counts on or trusts the self-endowing, all of which in this case would be forms of non-worldly intentionality? Husserls notion of God as a transcendence in immanence does justice to Henrys major concern (even though his presentation is thin in comparison to Henrys). But for Husserl God is entelechy and therefore the divine is di-polar,

212 i.e., not only a transcendence in immanence but also a transcendence to the transcendence of the world.67 Husserls position, further, has the obvious advantage of avoiding the excessive devaluation of the world. As Rudolf Bernet has observed, whereas Husserl (in the reduction) and Christianity (in faith and practice) perform a kind of withdrawal from the world, the net effect is to restore to the world its proper integrity, indeed, to save the world, not to render it irredeemable, as does Henry in his own reduction.68 Yet Henry would respond that he does not destroy or damn the world but rather returns it to its true status, an expression of life. The critique of the barbarism of modern technological-capitalist megamachine is precisely that it defines the world apart from life and places power outside of and over life and lifes powers. The critique of the barbarism of the modern technological-capitalist megamachine is precisely that it defines the world apart from life and displaces to the world lifes power so that life appears only under the conditions stipulated by the world and as subject to the power of the world.69

9. Some Questions Regarding the Metaphysics of Life Running throughout Henrys discussions there are ancient philosophical and theological themes. Not least of these is the underlying substance-metaphysics. Recall (see above section 1.) how we said that Henry sees temporality as equivalent to worldly intentionality in so far as the temporal ecstases establish time as a self-attaining by way of an exteriorization to oneself. (Also for this discussion see 199 ff.) And in conjunction with this recall his view that the truth of the world, which consists in time, is that appearing/disappearing in which all things of the world are caught. (200) For the birth of the transcendental I, Lifes effecting self-affection is an absolute Before, the separation from which is death, and the union with which is eternal life and parousia. This effecting of self-affection is not a before enjoying the temporal ecstasy of retention, the distance of which is overcome in memorys represencing. The absolute Before of transcendental birth escapes the horizontality and exteriority of temporal exstases because Lifes self-generation, its coming to itself, unfolds without any horizon of exteriority, any ecstasis. Although Henry generally wants to speak of non-reflexive consciousness as non-relational,70 thereby keeping at bay any suggestion that immediate selfawareness is a result of a self-relating intentional act, e.g., reflection, here he has recourse to the language of relation. In this way that which is engendered in this process of self-generation never relates itself to that engendering it as a Before from which it would be separated through any distance, through the distance of an ecstasis

213 in the present case through the ecstasis of the past. . . Each form of relation which attains its possibility not from the distancing of an exstasis creates it in pathos. (201) The indubitable self-suffering, e.g., of a pain or feeling, is a self-relation without the slightest distance to or over against itself; if it so related to itself through the distance, e.g., of reference, it would have ceased at some time to feel itself in order to feel itself from outside itself through reference.71 It would then no longer be that pure impression steeped in itself which is not capable of the slightest withdrawal or separation from itself. Consider, e.g., how the one experiencing the pain is forced to experience it so long as he has it, so long as it is there. Henry now makes an important distinction between the pathic self-relation which is ever the self-same life and the modalities, e.g., sensations, feelings, etc. This pathic self-relation which inhabits all these modalities is not the fact of any of these particular modalities, e.g., this particular sadness, this particular joy, this particular pain, etc. Rather this pathic self-relation belongs to life as its pathic flesh, as the pure phenomenological substance of which life is made up. (201) Thus the particular modalities are accidents in which Life as substance is always lived. Life is not an unknown I know not what over and above the modalities; rather the pathic self-relation is lived only through these modalities and none of these comprise essentially the original pathic selfrelation of original non-reflexive self-manifestation. Further, Life is a process of eternally attaining itself in the ongoing self-experience through the modalities. Here there is pathic temporality wherein there is neither before nor after, but eternal change or motion in which life never ceases to experience itself.72 In never ceasing to experience itself it is always Now and in this Now as such there is never a being before or after. And one cannot say it is now because that would be to make the Now something intended and with a duration in which there would be past and futural phases. For Henry, from his earliest meditations, there are reasons to call the self-affection both radically temporal and non-temporal. In the latest formulations, however, there seems to be no distinction between radical immanent temporality of self-affection and a kind of timelessness; cf. 201. In this sense flesh and the lived body may also both be said to have invisible, eternal, unborn and deathless aspects. I am unborn and non-contingent in so far as I am transcendentally born, i.e., generated in absolute Lifes self-generation; such an I is one who can therefore say to the scandal of his listeners, Before Abraham was, I am73 similarly I do not die in so far as I participate in absolute Lifes self-generation (199).74 Some questions arise here. In The Essence of Manifestation Henry claims that the history of our tonalities [of our self-affectings] is the history of the absolute. The absolute itself is the passage.75 If this is a passage which is the life of the same, must there not be some kind of non-objectifying identity

214 synthesis, e.g., of Husserls primal impression, Ur-gegenwrtigung, as prior to and constitutive of Now? If it is pure primal presencing there is no passage; if there is only a flux of different primal presencings there is no same conscious Life. If this is the phenomenological absolute, the phenomenological substance, wherein the passage is essentially received and contingent, how can Henry speak phenomenologically of the flux of tonalities being prescribed and willed by the absolute?76 assuming the will of the absolute is the source of all necessities? In I am the Truth we do not find the language of the phenomenological absolute and substance and have instead Life/Father/hyper-power as somehow able to bring itself about (sapporter; German translation: sich verursachen) in the hyper-power of its self-donation and thereby to live . . . , i.e., we posit (have revealed to us?) a moment prior to Lifes living and ipseity even though Life exists only in the self-movement of its immanent temporality and is never separated from this and therefore never separated from ipseity (202 203). In pathic temporality life never ceases to experience itself in the Self that eternally generates it and which itself is never separated from itself. (202) But here too we do not learn whether this is a matter of necessity or contingency (the Fathers gift?), even though Henrys whole philosophy would seem to ride on its being necessary. (And if this latter is true then it agrees with Christian orthodoxy about the necessity of the processions ad intra within the divine life.) In short, we may grant that for Henry the divine life, the life of the absolute must be life, i.e., a stream of self-affectings. Yet we must ask how the absolute can be temporal and yet will or bring itself about in self-affection. Are not self-affections and temporality essentially contingent? How could immanent temporality be constituted by something like Lifes will? How does Life get a will prior to ipseity?77 In what sense are our self-affectings those of the divine? In what sense is the divine affected by our self-affectings? Do we have a (WhiteheadianHartshornian) commingling of agency and receptivity, necessity and contingency in the divine principle here?78 Do we not here have philosophical-theological speculation which stands in considerable tension with the phenomenological substance where there can be nothing prior to the self-affection and ipseity? Even if we grant the distinction between a received ipseity and the one which is not a gift but derives from the very power of Life itself to self-affect itself, we still have the problem of thinking about Life prior to this self-affecting. Let us spell this problem out. We have an analogy of samenesses or similarities, not strict identities, with a difference: Passive genesis of myself/self-manifestation: Life/selfaffecting: Hyper-power of Life/ipseity: Father/the Eternal Son: The Eternal Son/the sons of God. In each case the basic analogate is Henrys explication of

215 non-reflexive awareness wherein he says there is a kind of identity of the sensing and the sensed, feeling and felt, experiencing and experienced (75). [If there were strict identity (Cette identit de lprouvant et d lprouv est lessence originelle de lIpsit, 75) it is hard to see how there could be the pathic self-relating which makes possible a distinction (therefore non-identity) not only between the sensing and the sensed but also between Father, Son, and Sons.] As Rudolf Bernet has already noted the Father qua Life is a principle which seems to be as such without self-awareness, self-manifestation, until it engenders the selfness of the Son. Henry himself notes the strange sense of Father. The Father if we understand by that the movement which nothing precedes and of which no one knows, the name by which Life is poured into itself in order to experience itself , the Father engenders in himself eternally the Son, if we understand by that the First Living, That One in whose original and essential ipseity the Father experiences Himself. (76) But the phenomenological substance, as we have seen, is Lifes self-affecting through its modalities. So the Father or Life apart from the pathic self-relation is only an abstract moment or part of the whole, like feeling pain and pain, or sensing and the sensed. Yet in Henry Life itself seems to be the original agent because he repeatedly speaks of the Son being generated in the hyper-power of absolute Life (e.g., 203). How can the substance be at once the pathic selfaffection and, at the same time, Life as that which is prior to this self-affection and by reason of a hyper-power generates it? 10. Conclusion In these questions ancient Christian theological issues are echoed. Aside from the heterodoxy of Henrys dyadism (the Holy Spirit plays no necessary role) there is the philosophically more basic issue of the relationship between Godhead, person, and process. Attempts have been made to say that the divine aseity, i.e., Godhead existing by Itself and not by reason of another (or God as not needing the world and God plus the world is not greater than God alone), can be made compatible with God as source (and in two cases [persons], recipient) of generations and processions by thinking aseity in a positive way. That is, the divines absoluteness and aseity are not mere negative claims, such as the divine has no cause and would exist whether the world or some other cause existed or not; but rather they assert the positive claim that the Godhead is the cause of itself and exists through itself. That the divine is causa sui means not merely that it is false that God has no sufficient reason and is the result of blind chance; rather it belongs to the Godhead to generate itself and be its own origin. In which case there is no conflict between divine

216 aseity and divine origin or source. Thus the doctrine of trinity is not to be thought of as in contradiction to aseity and Gods absoluteness but as an enrichment. Trinity is the form of the absolute existing out of and through itself. Trinity is the way the aseity of the living God is elucidated.79 Now, it seems clear that such a line of thought, is not far removed from the Henryian. And it is no surprise because Eckhart is the exemplary thinker of immanence for Henry. Does not Henrys exclusion of ecstatic temporality strive to establish a kind of process or temporality in the phenomenological absolute which accounts for the divine ipseity? And may we not say that Henry, in spite of the use of the term Father (by which he means the unnameable hyper-power or source of the movement to self-affection) joins Eckhart, Heinrich Schell et alii in locating the inner basis for the generations within the Godhead in the essence of the Godhead (cf. Henrys Life: principium quo sed non principium quod), not in the divine persons. This is the sense we may give to the hyper-power of Life as something prior to the ipseities in their various interrelated and reciprocal involvments.80 Of course, the tradition thought of these matters for the most part, excepting perhaps great stretches in Eckhart and Fichte, in terms of third-person experiences, objects of intentional acts, and worldly ontologies. Even Augustines analogy of mens with the trinity is an analogy of third-person considerations. With Michel Henry there is a sustained effort to make theology from start to finish a firstperson project, i.e., an examination of the essential self-revelation of mind that is prior to intentionality, even though inevitably the explications become quasiobjectifications, and therefore seemingly third-person themes. But for transcendental phenomenology the first-person perspective is maintained as a phenomenological perspective in as much as the essentially non-objective, when reflected on (and becoming third-person) is experienced as the same as what before was experienced non-objectively (nicht wahregenommen, sondern erlebt); and indeed the reflected on is experienced as part of the retention of the present act of reflecting and the reflected on is likewise experienced as what had this act of reflection in its protention. And what now in this act of reflection qua reflecting is being experienced non-objectively is experienced as having in its protention (in its I can) a possible objectification capable of rendering it as the same as what before was non-objective. Thus the third-person language of first-person experiences finds its primary reference in first-person experiences. The continuity with this primary reference is made possible by the original intentionality of retentions and protentions that Henry disallows. They are profiles of the same which as first-person, as Henry has rightfully insisted, essentially resists being so profiled. It resists because it exists as such independently of speech and reference and is essentially non-objective. But so existing it is unphilosophical in the sense that its philosophical intelligibility comes to light only through speech and reference.

217 Henrys book is a remarkable and stunningly brilliant phenomenological theology. It gets to the heart of transcendental phenomenology and generates fundamental questions about its meaning which ought to shape many of its future conversations. As Rudolf Bernet has remarked, if Henry did not exist, we phenomenologists would have to invent him. So powerful is Henrys theological achievement, that one who has worked through his analyses is unlikely to read again The New Testament, especially the Johannine writings, without strong Henryian reverberations.

Acknowledgement I wish to thank Professor Rudolf Bernet, Director of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, for permission to quote from the Nachlass.

Notes
1. Michel Henry, Cest moi, la vrit (Normandy: ditions du Seuil, 1996). The numbers within parentheses in the text will refer to this edition. There is an excellent German translation by the leading Henry scholar Rolf Khn, Ich bin die Warheit: Fr eine Philosophie des Christentums} (Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1997). This edition has a helpful glossary, index, and bibliography. Besides Khns rich Afterword, there is a Forward by Rudolf Bernet which begins with the statement which should catch the ear of American readers: The comprehensive work of Henry has shaped French phenomenology as deeply and as enduringly as the writings of J.P. Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Lvinas or Paul Ricoeur. Although there is clear development, there is also amazing continuity in Henrys thought. Henrys first great work, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etzkorn (Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; French original 1963) is, among many other things, a first statement of Henrys phenomenological theology. (This work hereafter will be referred to by EM and the French pagination will also be given preceded by Fr.) This holds especially for most of Section Three, most obviously the discussions of Meister Eckhart, as well as 6870 where the will of the Absolute is treated. The Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), originally intended as a part of EM itself holds theological interest, especially in regard to the Western notions of the body as sin, and the meaning of flesh. I have found it thus possible to read the recent works as elaborations of the later and the later as elaborations of the earlier. 2. For Henrys criticism of Husserl, see especially, Phnomenologie matrielle (Paris: PUF, 1990). For some initial Husserlian responses, see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press; and James G. Hart, Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light in Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity, ed. Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 5982. 3. See M. Henry, Phnomnologie materielle (Paris: PUF, 1990), esp. ch. I. Throughout this work Henry criticizes Husserl for not appreciating that what Husserl calls pure consciousness cannnot be an object of phenomenological reflection without radically transforming it. Pure consciousness as essentially pre- or non-reflective is a form of selfmanifestation prior to, and the condition for, all intentionality. In its purity it is essentially

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different from consciousness as intentionality. Establishing the identity of the pre-reflexive with that which appears through reflection is also a problem for Henry. This issue highlights an ancient tension in Husserl. Perhaps the first version of it is in the Fifth Logical Investigation, 3., where Husserl makes proposals toward the phenomenological sense of Erlebnis. Here we have what I take to be a non-intentional, non-objectifying selfmanifestation, where there is no difference between the lived or conscious content and the Erlebnis itself. But then in the subsequent clarifications (4 ff.) of Erlebnis this sense is lost in favor of forms of reflective experience. The issue finds its most basic discussion in Husserl in the analyses of inner time-consciousness. Cf. for some of the issues Dan Zahavis forthcoming Self-awareness and Alterity; also my Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light, op. cit. But Husserl often enough sees Henrys basic concern that there is an essentially different form of manifestation in the non-reflexive selfawareness and the properly reflective, phenonomenological sort. Cf. Husserliana III, 28 where non-reflexive awareness is also called life and 45 where Husserl succumbs to seeing the non-reflexive as a form of marginal consciousness. But, on the other hand, cf., e.g., the 1917 (very Henryian) formulation: Actual life and, inseparably, living it through [Leben und Erleben] of course is always conscious, but it is not therefore always experienced and known [erfahren und gewusst]. For that there is necessary a new pulse of actual life, so-called reflective or immanent experience. This latter does not get added to the early living in a sum-like manner, attaching, as it were, to the occurrent external experiencing or thought-filled experiencing, but rather it transforms it in a peculiar way [wandelt es eigentmlich]. The immanent objectification extinguishes the actual life that it makes into an object. Consciousness and content of consciousness as object are no longer living consciousness, but rather precisely reflection of the same and, correspondingly, theoretical themes of a new actual life, called phenomenological research. As such they are as it were something appearing and something to be determined. Husserliana, XXV, 89. 4. I borrow these terms of genitive of manifestation and dative of manifestation from Thomas Prufer and Robert Sokolowski. 5. That appearings are inseparable from being and not intervening substitutes for it are recurrent themes in the writings of Robert Sokolowski and John Drummond. See the thorough discussion by Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and non-Foundational Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990). To appreciate the extent of Henrys philosophy of immanence and his suspicion regarding the genitive of manifestation consider that, in La Barbarie (Paris: ditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1987), 7274; Die Barbarei, trans. Rolf Khn and Isabelle Thireau (Freiburg: Alber, 1994), 153154, he argues that standard phenomenology errs in thinking of, e.g., colors as properties of physical objects. Rather such qualities are only the objectification and re-presentation of the impression of a self-affection or life. Husserl would agree with Henry that the worldly properties require the constituting agency of subjectivity and the latter is not able to be thought away in the worlds self-presentation; but that is not to devalue the natural attitudes findings and to claim that qualities are mere substitutes for or projections of self-affectings. For Husserl the scientific world is to be founded in the life-world; for Henry, it would seem, the life-world itself is not only to be founded in life or self-affections but is to be debunked as a mere transcendental illusion. Curiously Henrys final position verges closer to the Gailean one he regards as demonic. In the Galilean position the qualitiative description of the world is merely a subjective impression; and for that reason in Henry our alienation from nature as a surroundings pervaded by beings, qualities, properties, and eco-systems that are not man-made is once again affirmed. 6. For Husserl, too, e.g., Logical Investigations V, 3, Between the experienced (erlebten) or conscious content and the [non-reflexive] experiencing (Erlebnis) itself there is no

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distinction. The felt, e.g., is nothing other than the feeling. If an experience (Erlebnis) relates itself to an object which is to be distinguished from it, as, e.g., the external perception to the perceived, the naming representation to the named object, etc., then this object is not experienced (erlebt) or conscious in the sense which here is being nailed down; rather it is perceived, named, etc. As we shall see for Henry this absence of distinction and distance amounts most often to identity; yet in cases where he wants to preserve a sense of relation, as especially in theological matters, the identity is jeopardized. In the text of Husserl just quoted, the irrelational character which Henry early emphasizes is maintained. In recent analytic quarters, H.-N. Castaeda has raised an objection which would, if true and capable of appropriate extension, provide new difficulties for phenomenology: the non-distinction between pleasure/pain and the consciousness of pleasure/pain is an example of a case of Externus or un-selfconsciousness; there here is no evidence for I-consciousness. For Castaeda proper I consciousness is wherein I refer to myself as myself in the achievement of the indexical I. As we shall see this is an issue for Husserl and Henry also. Husserl speaks of the necessary equivocation of I because of the multiple layers of phenomenological reflection. And Henry has an analogy, if not equivocation, in the account of the layers of transcendental ipseity or selfness. See Hector-Neri Castaeda, The Phenomeno-Logic of the I: Essays on Self-Consciousness, edited by Tomis Kapitan and James Hart (forthcoming with Indiana University Press, 1999). See especially the essay on Philosophical Method and Direct Awareness of the Self (1979); cf. also my editors Introduction where I sketch the debate between Castaedas position and that of Husserl, Henry, and Sartre. See the very basic statement in EM, 683684; Fr. 860861. Henry, The Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (The Hague: 1975), 187. Cf. Dan Zahavi, Self-awareneness and Alterity, ch. VII. Henry, The Geneology of Psychoanalysis (Stanford, 1993), 134. This is said in commenting on Freud, but I take Henry to be here expressing his own view. See his Reflexions sur la cinquime Mditation Cartsienne de Husserl, now appearing in his Phnomenologie matrielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); a German translation is in Radikale Lebensphnomenologie, trans. Rolf Khn (Freiburg: Alber, 1992). For a fine discussion of the It-can as related to I-must and I-cannot, see Drew Leders The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 4648. I do not think that Henrys notion of the organic body, which is an immediate moving terminus of the absolute subjective egological body, in contrast to the transcendent body which is the body from a third-person perspective, can adequately handle the It-can. The latters forms of initiative and resistance seem to me to be such that they, as Leder shows, elude the Is agency and motion and this elusiveness is evident itself in the first-person, not merely from the third person perspective. For Henrys rich theory of the organic body, see Philosophy and Phemnomenology of the Body, 122135, 148 ff. Elizabeth Behnke calls attention to the Icannot in Husserl in Hua IV, 254259 in her Phenomenology of the Body in Ideas II, Issues in Husserls Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 145. I have enlisted Aristotle as a potential critic of Henry. Yet it seems for Aristotle there is phenomenologically evident a distinction between zoon and bios. The latter term in Greek corresponds to what someone might mean when referring to my life. And this distinction therefore moves Greek perception close to Henrys Vie. Aristotle not only determines life to be what is erlebt, sensed or felt, but he also has a theory of the non-reflexivity of the awareness of life. See Nicomachean Ethics, 1175a 25-ll75b 2. See also Anton Hermann Chroust, Aristotle: Protepticus: A Reconstruction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 69-87, and Chrousts commentary, especially at 69 for the remarkable

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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text on the lived non-reflexive awareness of life from the Eudemian Ethics 1244b 6 ff. I develop these themes in Wisdom, Knowledge, and Reflective Joy: an Exchange Between Aristotle and Husserl in a forthcoming anthology (in Greek) on phenomenology and Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics edited by A. Kontos. Henry deepens Husserls claim that European culture is a form of barbarism (Hua VI, 347). See the last chapter of Cest moi, la vrit} as well as Henrys book, La Barbarie (Paris: Grasset, 1987). Cf. my forthcoming A Phenomenological Theory and Critique of Culture: A Reading of Michel Henrys La Barbarie in Continental Philosophy Review, (19992000), ed. Anthony Steinbock. See Linvisible et la rvlation: Entretien avec Michel Henry in La curiosit: les vertiges du savoir, Serie Morales, N. 12 (Paris: dition Autrement, 1995), 92. Here already we may raise the question of whether respect is not an intentional act and not a mere selfaffection. Henry, EM, 382; Fr., 481. Henry, EM, 144; Fr. 174. Franz Kafka, to whom Henry devotes some pages in EM, 403 406, has a text which captures in essence this aspect of Henrys thought quite precisely. The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal: Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence, (or, temporally expressed, the eternal capoitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not. Paradise, in The Basic Kafka, ed. Erich Heller (New York: Washington Square, 1979), 168169; I owe this text to Steven Galt Crowell. Henry, EM, 147148; Fr., 179. Perhaps we can say it is pure because it is transcendental, purified of worldly manifestation; and therefore it is pure because it is free of a genitive of manifestation and dative of manifestation. Cf. also Quest-ce quune rvlation?, Filosofia della rivelazione from the series, Biblioteca dell Archivo di filosofia, Vol 11 (Podova: CEDAM, 1994), 51. See Hua X, 107, 196, 221; in the last two citations empfunden and erlebt both are used for the non-reflexive self-awareness. See Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Collected Papers (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 173186; also his De constitutione Christi: ontologica et psychologica (Rome: Gregorian University, 1961), 8399. Because Paul Ricoeur is not prepared to acknowledge the essentially non-reflexive, non-objective form of manifestation of the original immediate self-feeling (which itself he seems to acknowledge but as having no cognitive value and as vain, empty and devoid of all truth), he is forced to make all philosophical evidence a form of reflexive interpretation and hermeneutics. See his discussion in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Dennis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale, 1970), 4345, 377 ff. Using Lonergans language we may say that sub ratione experti subjecti it is not yet knowledge of an essential, predicative, or propositional type, but it is an original, nonintentional, and immediate form of manifestation, and therefore of evidence, even though for it to appear as such it requires reflection. For example, Husserl, in speaking of how our perceiving of Others is an interpretation, goes on to say: These indeterminate co-posited interpretations are in a unity of identity with my original self-experience which is not an interpretation. Cf. my Constitution and Reference in Husserls Phenomenology of Phenomenology, Husserl Studies (1989), 4372. One way of stating the basic difference between the two thinkers is to say that for Husserl, although non-reflective awareness is the necessary condition for philosophy, nevertheless philosophy is a form of knowing and therefore of filled intention. In that respect reflection

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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provides the fullness for the emptiness of non-reflective consciousness even though this emptiness is an indeterminate determinability not founded in an empty intention. On the other hand, for Henry, knowing is always inadequate, corrigible, and partial and can never serve as the way of access to philosophy as wisdom rooted in first principles. The bias of the tradition is to seek to establish first principles in knowledge and to hold that immediate non-reflexive self-presence is incapable of providing us with such principles. On filled and empty intentions, see Husserl Logical Investigations (New York: Humanities, 1970), Introduction to Investigation VI, Vol. II, 670, 728729, 744. Cf. Max Schelers study of the religious act and especially his claim that faith as belief-in is a unique kind of filling of the religious acts intention of a realm incommensurate with what is given within the phenomenological world. See his On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 246270. See Hans Jonas remarks, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 34. I in no way wish to allign Henrys thought with the ravings of some of the Gnostics. I merely want to say that the intentional structure of faith gives way to a kind of knowing, which of course is not a rational sense of knowing founded on intentional evidence and/or logic. Its philosophical analog and exemplar is the knowing of oneself in the first-person. And for Henry this knowing, because the condition for the possibility for any form of evidence or rationality, is entitled to be regarded as hyper-evident and hyper-rational. For Husserl, faith becomes a theme primarily in reference to Vernunftglaube. But it is also a form of value-perception. Perhaps what comes closest to what Henry has in mind is the text in Husserliana XXVII, 65 where the religious person of exemplary sort knows God as intuited in himself and as originally one with him. Therefore he knows himself as an embodiment of the divine light itself. . . For a treatment of these themes, see my The Study of Religion in Husserls Writings, in Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. M. Daniel and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 265296. Cf. my A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology, in Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart, ed., Essays in Phenomenological Theology (Albany: SUNY, 1986), 134 159. Thinkers sensitive to gender issues might well be concerned about the strong male symbolism. For Henry it is clear that this is merely deference to the symbols of the tradition. They are symbols of metaphysical theological themes which surpass the specificity of gender. As we shall see below, the grace of a transcendental birth as a divine son, i.e., the receiving of the ipseity which is inseparable from the divines self-manifestation and the generation of the ipseity of the Primal Son is the grace of absolute life. The living in the Primal Sonship is more basic than being Jew or Greek, slave or free, man or woman (Cf. Galatians, 3:28). (For this discussion of gender, see 310315.) Still, it might be said that there is biblical precedent for the gender-neutral form of child or children of God, especially in regard to the determination of the meaning of transcendental birth; cf. 315. And for the discussion of the pathic flesh (cf. The Word became Flesh), the proto-self of elemental self-affectings, out of which a transcendental self is made, womanly imagery better renders this sense of Christ, e.g., as the pathic Flesh which is Lifes self-donation and the original self out of which and from which all Is emerge. Henrys position here, which is at the heart of his theory of intersubjectivity as well as Christology, is captured in his statement: . . . it is impossible to touch the flesh of anyone without first touching the `Flesh of Christ. (315) Cf. our discussion in 7. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 46. In Marions preface to the German anthology, Michel Henry, Radikale Lebensphnomenologie, there is no hint of this criticism. For a strong Neo-Thomist and phenomenological statement of these theses, see Robert

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

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Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1982/1995). For Henry after creation there are more vivants but there is not more vie. To see this consider that the relation of Life to what has life is not simply reciprocal: The reciprocity is found only in the relationship of interiority of absolute Life and the Primal Son, in so far as the ipseity, in which God eternally embraces Himself, is that of the Primal Son who finds himself generated in this way. Between the ipseity of absolute Life and the I of each that lives there is no relation of reciprocity of this kind; the path cannot be run in both directions. God could live eternally in his Son, and the Son in the Father, without another living being ever coming to life. But the coming-to-life of every other living being, the transcendental birth of any I whatsoever, implies, on the contrary, the ipseity and therewith the generation of the Primal Son in the absolute Life. Cest moi, la vrit, 162. EM, 660664; Fr. 830836. See Henry, EM, e.g., 335 ff.; also 282283; Fr. 419 ff.; also Fr. 351353. For this reader Henrys non-reflexive self-awareness is clearly non-relational in the sense that there is no distance of reference and intentionality between the parts (moments) comprising this immanence. And because we must speak of the distinctive moments of e.g., feeling, felt, and act of disclosure, we may raise the question of how the parts are related. This opens the door for Henrys speculative philosophical theology which depends on relation within immanence. A question this reader repeatedly returns to is whether the philosophicaltheological description of the relationship of these parts itself does not depend on intentionality, i.e., relationships of reference. I say standard view because Husserls axiology undergoes a decisive voluntarist turn which Ullrich Melle and I have pointed out on various occasions. That is to say that for Husserl too there is a sense in which a sense of affect or will goes in advance of the perceptual objects upon which the emotive acts are founded. See Melles Editors Introduction to Husserliana, XXVIII, pp. XL VI-XLVIII and his Husserls Phenomenology of Willing, in Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, ed. James G. Hart and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), especially, 188192. I take this to mean that feelings enjoy a phenomenality, i.e., objectifiability, which selfaffectings do not enjoy because feelings are intentional relations emergent out of self-affectings. Michel Henry, EM, 563; Fr. 704705; see the entire discussion in 62. See 63 in EM for a discussion of the problem of false feelings. EM, 564; Fr. 706; for this discussion see 560564; Fr., 701706. See EM, 646ff.; Fr. 835 ff. See below, n. 62 for a surprising Husserlian affinity with this theme in Henry. I must note that in La Barbarie, 168 ff. Henry recognizes a teleology, even an infinite task, 181, in the primal self-affecting. Especially in as much as this teleology is prior to any intentionality I believe something like Husserls divine entelechy or (divine) latent will is required for making sense of this. EM, 649; Fr., 815. Henry rightly notes in the course of this discussion the proximity of his thought to Luther. In Catholic theology, one finds, e.g., in John of St. Thomas teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, a doctrine congenial to that of Henry: The souls affects are quickened by the Holy Spirit so that the intellect, under the affects of the Holy Spirit, knows a more lies hidden in faith than faith itself reveals, and from this more it judges more highly of things divine than does mere faith or faith-informed intellect. See Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1959), 262 for a translation of key texts. EM, 656; Fr. 824-825. As we shall see in 7., Henrys theology embraces the Kierkegaardian position that the self [as a relation to itself] cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Sickness Unto Death, Part I, A. See EM, 676682; Fr. 850859 for Henrys appropriation of Kierkegaard.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

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41. See my Blondel and Husserl: Continuing the Conversation, Tidjschrift voor filosofie, Vo.. 58 (1996), 490518. 42. See Husserl, Hua XV, 378 ff., 404405: Human individuals and communities are said to live facing infinity under the sway of a latent will-horizon. I have discussed this theme in conjunction with Blondel in Blondel and Husserl: Continuing the Conversation. 43. Here are some passages from Husserls unpublished manuscripts which I contextualize in my A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology and Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: Prayer is not an outward intentionality, not to a Father up there, but a being directed within to the inkling of the interiority of God which founds every real religion. (E III 9, 30). Yet this merely immanentist view has its counterpoise in: God can thereby be no object of possible experience (as in the sense of a thing or a human). But God would be experienced in each belief that believes orginallyteleologically in the eternal value of that which lies in the direction of each absolute ought and which engages itself for this eternal meaning. (A V 21, 128a) In this connection see the remarkable letter to Abb Baudin (that almost verbatim repeats the important E III 4 theological statement) in Briefwechsel VII, 2022. But there are significant passages which stress the transcendence in immanence. For example, the (1926) letter to Mahnke where the analyses of passive synthesis are a way of showing from below how God creates the world in an eternal creating. See Briefwechsel III, 453454; also Karl Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 295;. Also we find balance in the following texts from A V 21, 42a, 47a, 102a: We find a way to God. The unsearchable Within. . . The absolute world and God as the one substance, as the source of all being, as the principle of all development in the world, as the world-ordering power, as world-creator, as the principle of the constitution of a world that has laws and is oriented toward values and the realization of values. The divine life passes through my heart, through the pulsebeat of my life. The love of God and the love of the world. . . The I-all is born in the free creation of a best world, but in the divine drive, and on the basis of the divine creation of an undisclosed true world. In Blondel, see, e.g.: our role is to act so that God may be entirely in us as He is there perforce, and to find at the very principle of our consent to His sovereign action His efficacious presence. The true will of man is the divine willing. To acknowledge his fundamental passivity is, for man, the perfection of his activity. . . Not to appropriate anything to oneself is the only method of acquiring the infinite. It is wherever we are no longer our own. Maurice Blondel, Action (1893) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 356. 44. Cf. Nietzsche: Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. I, On the Afterworldly. Husserl, Blondel and Henry would each have different ways of appropriating and rejecting this Nietzschean text. But here another point must be made. Because in Henry, the reduction is for the most part only a tacit theme, and also because I am concerned with making parallels with modern philosophical theological thinkers, like Blondel, for whom also the reduction is not a central theme, my presentation may easily appear to lapse into the natural attitude. Thus the transcendence surpassing the transcendence of the world can be taken as separated from the transcendental transcendence of the world and therefore as an otherworldly transcendence conceived in the natural attitude. But such an otherworldly transcendence is still a mundane transcendence. The phenomenological transcendence of the transcendental realm to the mundane of the natural attitude has nothing to do with the otherworldly transcendence of the natural attitude; but the phenomenological transcendence of the transcendence of the world has everything to do with the transcendental transcendence in immanence because of the di-polar functioning of the divine entelechy. Husserl

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distinguishes within the transcendental attitude a transcendence in immanence which has nothing to do with the immanence of the natural attitude, e.g., the interiority of ones heart or what is in ones head, and a transcendence to the transcendence of the world, which is to be sharply distinguished from the otherworldly, conceived as heaven, extraterrestial, the realm of spirits, etc. Cf. the remarks by Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation Part II, Ergnzungsband, ed. Guy Van Kerckhoven (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988) 112. See also Thodice dans la perspective dune phnomnologie radicale, Archivio de filosofia, Vol. 13 (1988), 383393. Translated as Hinfhrung zur Gottesfrage: Seinsbeweis oder Lebenserweis? in Radikale Lebensphnomenologie, 251273. Yet, on Henryian principles, there is something to be said for the metaphor of light and the appropriation of the Advaita Vedanta theme of immediate self-consciousness as selfluminosity, i.e., a lightsomeness not lighted by any other light and which makes possible all other forms of coming to light. But for the Advaita Vedanta thinkers the peculiarities of this original self-manifestation leads to seemingly paradoxical utterances reminiscent of Henry: It is known because it is immediate, and yet it is unknown in that it can never become an object of knowledge, not even to itself. I do not think that I know it well, nor do I think that I do not know it. To whomever it is not known to him it is known, to whomever it is known, he does not know. See Bina Gupta, Perceiving in Advaita Vedanta (Delhi: Milital Barnarsidas Publishers, 1995), 63; see the entire Introduction for the topic of non-reflexive self-manifestation. See, e.g., EM, 382, 400 ff., 440 ff.; Fr. 481, 502 ff., 551 ff. For Henry, Eckhart is an exemplary thinker. See the lengthy discussion in EM, 3940, 49 which anticipates much of the theological ontology of Cest moi, la vrit. For a marvellously clear, concise, comprehensive and phenomenologically informed discussion of the issues within the framework of Indian philosophy and theology see especially ch. 2 and 8 of J.N. Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Michel Henry, Parole de Dieu: Une approche phnomenologique, Archivio de filosofia (1992), 163. As we shall see, Henry uses the Johannine logos theou (Word of God) for the immediate self-luminosity of selfness (ipseity) which Life attains in its self-effecting self-affection. The Primal Son is the ipseity engendered by the Father, Life. But humans as transcendental selves receive self-ness through this prior Primal Self/Sonship. See the discussion in section 7. After saying, the self only experiences itself if it experiences itself in the absolute life, Henry states: Such is the transcendence in all modality of immanence of life, for example in suffering . . . , and that does not mean any exteriority in which this suffering would find the means to free itself from itself and to flee itself. Transcendence in immanence might also be invisaged as a retrogredience or introscendence, i.e., a deepening of the immanence. But the fundamental considerations remain subjective-poles in that they are abiding samenesses this side of the ob-ject, even though the sameness is only apprehended as such in a objectifying, i.e., act of reflection. In Hua III, 57, Husserl speaks of the transcendental I in relation to the stream of acts as a transcendence in immanence. In 58 he speaks of God as transcendent to the transcendence in immanence of absolute consciousness. God is absolute, i.e., immanent, in a completely different way than the absolute of consciousness, just as God is transcendent in a completely different way than the transcendence of the world. (See also 51.) Cf. my attempt at an exegesis of these rich texts in A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology, 134142. Henry seems to presuppose familiarity with Husserls doctrine of I-can because he often merely mentions the phrase without explication. In Husserl the I is inextricably tied up

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

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with its havings, which are themselves inseparable from and imply its power, and its capacity. In a most elementary way I have and I can are tied to retentions and protentions of self-affections, foremost perhaps kinesthaeses; but there are higher-level founded habitualities/powers/capacities. So, e.g.: But I am not only an actual but also a habitual I and the habituality designates a certain egological possiblity, an I can, I could, I could have, and the being-able-to (Knnen) realizing itself again refers to Iactualities, to actual I-experiences (Icherlebnisse), precisely as actualizations of the beingable-to. Hua XV, 378. And: All being-directed is itself an unaware (ungewahrte) present; it is unthematic, non-aware self-givenness (nicht-gewahrende Selbstgegebenheit). The transcendental I however is already in a state of constant capacity of being able to become aware of the unaware (des Ungewahrten), and in the capacity of being able to become aware explicitly at any time of an I-can, and so forth repeatedly. C 5, 4; cited in Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit (The Hague: Nijhoff), 65. 52. See Hua XIV, 370; cf. also ch. 4 of my The Person and the Common Life. 53. Cf., Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Nijhoff, 162), 162. Cf. also my A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology. 54. If we accept that there is evident within non-reflective first-person experience passive self-donation, lets call it Lifes self-donation, then this sense of self is indeed prior to the proper sense of I as an indexical and as the agent of acts of disclosure and action. Indeed, the dative of manifestation (as that to which the appearing of . . . appears) has a kind of phenomenological priority to this proper (nominative-active) sense of I. It becomes of special interest to elucidate how we still here have first-person experience when the proper sense of I in the nominative case and as an indexical or occasional expression (Husserl), i.e., the achievement of oneself as oneself, is clearly not achieved. The further question arises of whether, in order that I, as passively given to myself through a kind of passive self-bequeathal (therefore myself as prior to I as the agent of disclosure, action, and indexicality), experience myself as an accusative, I must be displaced from the transcendental phenomenological perspective. What I phenomenologically can say is that I do not come upon the divine but upon rather perhaps the godly medium which is myself as self-accepting in the passive synthesizing, self-affecting. (I take this to be Husserls position.) This self-affecting, self-receiving, is inseparable from a self-trusting. There is not phenomenologically evident any independent giver of the gift which is myself. Obviously in the experience of the anothers voyeurism in regard to me, as Sartre has pointed out, I experience myself as an accusative. That, as an experience of transcendence (of the other peeping at me), is ruled out in the realm of immanence. And yet one might think of the kind of self-displacement which faith-filled reflection might provide, e.g., I come to enjoy through faith another perspective (through an unfilled intention) which enables me to experience myself (passively given to myself) as an object of some intending agency which, nevertheless, is still believed to be, somehow, within my first-person experience. (Cf. the Pauline Spirit of God, the Johannine light of our light, Augustinian God as the life of my life: cogito ergo cogitor.) But this gambit is not possible for Henry who, in turn, would disallow that these traditional notions be understood as forms of intentionality. Lifes self-actualization in me is not to be accounted for in the realm of intentionality. Yet this (postulated) agency of Lifes self-affecting is not given apart from myself as the gift, nor can this agency of giving or the gift (me) be considered apart from the giving. This agency can never be equated with the way I am made a me by an I, my own I (in self-referring or self-qualifying acts), or that of others. All these are relationships of reference. A fortiori it cannot be equated with the reification of me by a divine Other, a state of affairs which outraged Sartre. Such too is an act of intending reference. That by which I am incessantly given to myself, which generates the me of which Henry speaks, is prior to and the condition

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for intending acts. In short, working out the differences phenomenologically is difficult because I do not have phenomenological evidence for that (transcendence in immanence) which renders myself an accusative. The whole language of gift is a metaphor which draws on intentionality which is disallowed by Henry in the realm of self-affection. The transcendental phenomenologist wants to here say constituted. But in as much as this would mean an achievement by the primal I, in Henry we have a theological substitute: For the passive genetic constitution we have Lifes self-affecting. From a Husserlian standpoint the divine enters here too soon. The primal passive streaming as the basic ingredient of the primal I has two moments: a) the self-affecting hyletic moment and b) the egological-ideal moment. (See C 10, 23 and my discussion in A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology, 132134.) Granting this then for Husserl the divine as entelechy might be conceived as coinciding with this egological moment. In which case the primal streaming as hyle would be the radical other to the divine and would be the quasi-Aristotelian uncreated stuff (hyle) of monads. Also in such a conception, all Is would be uncreated and one with the divine in so far as the divine entelechy was identical with this egological principle. In so far as they were also constituted by the hyletic principle then they would be other than the divine; thus in various senses they would be both created and uncreated. Cf. my Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology. Henrys problematic claim here is one which is also a difficulty for transcendental phenomenology. Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivitt (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996) ch. 3, has helped me to see the difficulties of the Finkian interpretation to which I have been inclined. In this view there is a primal I-substance out of which monadic individuation emerges. Yet there are still texts in Husserl which support the Finkian reading. Furthermore what individuation means, prior to involvement in the world, prior to I as in any sense connected with the referent of the other personal and impersonal pronouns, is a very difficult matter. Cf. my Husserls Monadological Determination of the World, in a forthcoming German-Japanese volume on World edited by Hans Rainer Sepp; also in Parts of the Fink-Husserl Conversation, in a volume edited by Burt Hopkins in which Tom Nenon, Steve Crowell and I comment on Finks Sixth Cartesian Meditation to which queries Ron Bruzina responds. Phnomnologie de la naissance,Alter, No. 2 (1994), 308. Ibid., 304; for the topic of immortality and beginninglessness see below, n. 74 and the surrounding discussion in the text. Flesh here recalls the phenomenological theme of the touched-touching as well as the general kinaesthaesis of the body. Merleau-Ponty enlarged it to be a metaphor for being-inthe-world. The body as flesh is always self-affecting in its being hetero-affected. Christ is the Flesh of all the manifold forms of ipseity because ipseity is self-affecting and selfaffecting is the effect of Lifes self-affecting; and Christ or the eternal Word is precisely Lifes self-affecting, self-manifestation, etc. There is no I or self apart from Lifes self-affecting, i.e., the divine ipseity which is Christ. Henry does not seem concerned to establish a precise Christology. One wonders how he would come down on the issues raised by Chalcedon, i.e., one person with two natures, and the problem of the human and divine consciousness. For Lonergan, who perhaps has thought most deeply about these matters and in a way which shows great sympathy for basic positions of Husserl and Henry, there is an original non-reflexive consciousness of the divine person through the properly human non-reflexive consciousness of Christ. But this sense of knowing (sub ratione experti) is incomplete by itself and is therefore augmenteed by an intentional knowing (sub ratione quidditatis, veri, et entis) of a categorial nature which, with St. Thomas, he calls a blessed vision. That which we have through faith, an empty intention, Christs human consciousness has through vision. Thus for Christ in his

55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

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humanity, as well as for the Sons of God, the original self-manifestation is not the parousia, but rather is in need of an intentional knowing. See Bernard Lonergan, De constitutioine Christi: ontological et psychologica, 111112; for St. Thomas, see Summa Theologiae, I, q. 12. On the other hand, one wonders whether Aquinass discussion in q. 12, art. 5 of the lumen gloriae as the supernatural disposition for the vision might not be understood in a way more congenial to the Henryian transcendence in immanence. In Aquinas the advent of the lumen gloriae results in the very essence of God becoming the intelligible form of the created intellect. There seems to be no need for intentional acts as the having of the form of the other. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 6. Plotinus, Enneads III. 8. 8. Cf. Cest moi, la vrit, 170: The question is rather knowing why man has lost the concept of his true essence; why the sons no longer know that they are sons, as Plotinus observed. In another place Henry inserts in the primal self-affecting a conatus, need, or nisus toward the more and even an infinite task. How this occurs apart from intentionality or the divine entelechy is not at all clear. See Henry, La Barbarie, ch. 6. Besides the discussion of the Beatitudes in ch. 11, this theme is also extensively treated in EM, especially 70. For this concept in Husserl, see ch. 4 of my The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 324 ff. There is an unconditioned You ought and must, which is addressed to the person and which for the one experiencing this absolute affection is not submitted to a rational foundation nor is it dependent on an appropriate connection with such a foundations. This affection goes in advance of all rational analysis, even when such is possible. B I 21, 61a. This absolute affection as the truth of will and thus more basic than will as fiat, choice, decision, etc., is a theme which not only does not easily fit into Henrys critique of Husserl but is at the center of Henryian axiology. It also recalls Henrys dismissive attitude toward the universal voluntarism in Husserl where drive and instinct are assigned important roles in reflection on genetic constitution. Henrys claim (Phnomnologie matrielle, 158) that such considerations lack an appropriate theoretic context, such as provided by his own work, is partly right to the extent that Husserl did not fully appreciate the Henryian essence; but that it escaped him completely and that he had no sense of non-reflexive self-manifestation seems quite wrong. On the theme of instinct and non-reflexive awareness, see my Genesis, Instinct, and Reconstruction, a review article of Nam-In Lees Edmund Husserls Phnomenologie der Instinkte, in Husserl Studies, Vol. 15 (1998), 101123. Blondel, for whom the inadequation of our explicit acts of will with our basic latent will amounts to our incessant eluding ourselves, argues that the one thing necessary is realizing that there is at the bottom of my consciousness an I that is no longer I; we must look within ourselves to the point of where what is of us ceases. Maurice Blondel, Action (1893), trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 321; Fr. 347. Furthermore, as already noted, Husserl posits (in MS C 10) in original ipseity or the primal transcendental I a twofold of ultimate phenomenological principles: a hyletic one which would, properly understood, do justice to Henrys reproach that hyle are always results of intentionality, and an egological principle. It seems to me that one can have a hyletic or material phenomenology, i.e., one that affirms the absolutely basic character, the essence, of the self-affecting, and also acknowledge that it is always informed by entelechy or form, as in MS F I 24, 41b. Both would be prior to intentionality. As we noted in n. 63, Henry himself seems to be moving toward such a position. See also my A Prcis of a Husserlian Philosophical Theology. My own exposition is much indebted to Iso Kern and Klaus Held. See Rudolf Bernet, Christianisme et phnomenologie, forthcoming in an issue of Continental Philosophy Review devoted to Henry. Among the many merits of Bernets

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

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essay is that he shows the implicit critique of Levinas in Henrys book. In Henrys La Barbarie, the worlds qualities are reduced (i.e., seemingly collapsed) to the affections and its essences are reduced to the essential possibilities of the Is essence; see 74 and 108 ff. Cf. also our remarks in n. 5 above. One might well nurture the suspicion that there is a problem in the way Henry aligns himself with the New Testamental version of the world. He seems to establish an equivalence between the Christian view of the world and his philosophical critique of the modern megamachine. (See especially the last chapters of Cest moi, la vrit.) The former is a thesis regarding a demonic ungodly power resident in the world. The world is understood as what those apart from Christ understand by reality, the way things are, the powers that be, etc. The foil to the world as the source of the worship of riches, power, fame, and pleasure is the riches of being a Son of God which is the Christians by right of living a life hidden in Christ and apart from the world. That Henry has brilliantly brought out similarities with his critique of the barbarism of modern culture cannot be denied. The obvious, if not trivial, difference is that the latter depends on and is formed by a philosophical-phenomenological theory of manifestation; this as such, i.e., we need not dispute the suggestiveness of Henrys creative reading when we say the biblical authors were not doing phenomenology, is foreign to The New Testament. But the crucial question perhaps is whether we can conceive the realization of Henrys implied eutopian transformation of the world (implied in the critique of barbarism of modern culture, economics, and society) and still conceive at the same time a tension with the world in the Christian sense. This reader confesses to being undecided on this point. Ridding the world of its barbarism and transforming it into an expression and vehicle for the enrichment of life would not merely resemble the most eutopian of phantasies but would be hard to distinguish from the Christian Kingdom of God. Yet the question remains of whether the theme of dying (in some sense) to oneself, not merely to the world, taking up the cross, putting off the old man, in short, the radical self-renunciation called for would not still be a theme for Christians, even in the Henryian eutopia. Connected to this issue is Henrys reading of Nietzsche and even his occasional suggestion that Nietzsche, in spite of his total misunderstanding of Christianity, and The New Testament were kin in the affirmation of and exhortation to a super-abundant life. Both affirmed a possible fullness of life which is inherently denied by reigning definitions of humanity and interpretations of Christianity. See the discussion of Nietzsche in his Geneology of Psychoanalysis. Thereby finding alies in the German philosophers Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank who have through their writings quite convincingly, I believe, overturned the displacement of the subject by post-modernists. Here Henry draws near to the Husserl he criticizes in Phnomnologie matrielle. The foundations of inner time-consciousness are faulted for being ecstases, relations, albeit of a micro sort. But here Henry too finds a relation within consciousness immediate selfmanifestation, even though it is said to have no difference or distance. This goes against an earlier tendency where Henry presents the essence as irrelational. For Husserl and also Henry, there is here a kind of identity synthesis or sameness-indifference Although, according to Henry, Husserl would not be able to make this claim because the primal presencing would not itself be self-present or aware, but it would be aware only of what it made present in the original ecstasis of primal temporality, I think the thinkers might be made to draw closer to one another. For an important discussion, see Dan Zahavi, Self-awareness and Alterity, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press; cf. also my Intentionality, Phenomenality, and Light in Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity, ed. Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 5982. Further we here have

69.

70.

71.

72.

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the issue of the beginninglessness and endlessness of the transcendental I as Son of God. See below n. 74. John 8:58. Henrys explication of the geneology of Jesus in ch. 5 is one of his best exegetical discussions. For an early statement of how the absolute body, which is inseparable from absolute subjectivity, eludes contingency, see Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, 189190; Fr. 262263. Only what exists in a horizon is contingent; absolute subjectivity is in principle deprived of every horizon. Husserl too argues for the beginninglessness and endlessness of the transcendental I; see my Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance, in Religion and Time, ed. A.N. Baslev and J.N. Mohanty (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 1745. And for Husserl too there is a concentration of all transcendental phenomenological considerations into a metaphysics of life: All is one in life, and world is the self-objectification of life in the form of plants, animals, and humans who are born and die. But life does not die, because life is only in the universality and inner unity of life. . . But how is it with the streaming primal life in which the temporalization and mundanization happens? As phenomenologizing knower I know this temporalization, this self-objectification in all structures. . . . It is inconceivable that this streaming begin and cease. . . . The human cannot be immortal. The human necessarily dies. The human has no worldly pre-existence; in the temporal-spatial world he was earlier nothing and he later will be nothing. [Note: But an indirect mundanization of the dead as deceased occurs in the memory of the humans who live and have an effect on the deceased.] But the transcendental primal life, the ultimate world-creating life and its ultimate I cannot come to be out of nothing and pass into nothing; it is immortal, because dying has no sense for it, etc. Husserliana XXIX, 334-335, 338. But, again, for Husserl this primal life is not itself the divine. The divine is what besouls it, what is its entelechy, i.e., its form and telos. EM, 665; Fr., 836838. EM, 666; Fr., 837838. Again, Husserl, I believe, keeps separate (as moments of a whole) the hyletic flow and the egological or formal-ideal principle within the primal I (in C 10). But it is unclear whether the divine is the equivalent to the latter or whether the latter is the impress of the divine and that there is an ultimate non-divine contingent stuff, hyle, which is also the stream of selfaffections and which the divine must always presuppose and work with as its other. I wrestle with this in the earlier mentioned writings. Henry is not a process theologian in so far as that view requires positing the world as necessary for the divine. See n. 30. For this See Herman Schell, Katholische Dogmatik, ed. J. Hasenfuss and P-W. Scheele, Vol. II (Munich/Paderborn/Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schoeningh, 1968), 3537. Schell was a student of Franz Brentano. For an account of the correspondence between them see Eduard Winter, Franz Brentanos Ringen um eine neue Gottessicht (Bruenn/Vienna/ Leipzig: Verlag Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1941). For Franz Brentanos critique of Schell on this point of the divine being cause of itself, see Brentano, Religion und Philosophie (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1954), 126130: As an evident certain judgment need not be grounded so also there is a being which is without being grounded. To say God is cause of himself is to subsume everything under the allegedly more basic principle that everything must have a cause even though in this case there is also admitted that the cause cannot be something other than God. Note that Henry has reason to agree with this consideration even though it undermines a way of talking about God: life. He would not approve, however, of Brentanos ontotheology. In studying Brentano it is clear that his God is in some sense a super-being thought of in the natural attitude. Further, Gods life is a life vis-a-vis the world; there is no way of talking about the immanent life of God and therefore no sympathy

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

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with Schells, a fortiori Henrys, project. For a lovely sketch of Brentanos process theology, see 110119 of Religion und Philosophie. 80. Whereas I think this proposal is compatible with Henry, whether essence of the Godhead could possibly have meaning for Husserl is a good question. In E III 4 he held that God was neither a Wesen nor an Eidos. God, in regard to the world and for transcendental subjectivity, the first absolute, is clearly an Idea and entelechy. See my Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A Sketch of the Foundations of Husserlian Metaphysics, in The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. LXVI (1992), 189212. But God in himself, as a second absolute apart from transcendental subjectivity, as the first absolute, although a very unphenomenological notion, is a theme at least in one place. See the 1932 letter to his friend Gustav Albrecht in Edmund Husserl Briefwechsel Vol. IX, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 83-84. Cf. my discussion in The Summum Bonum and Value-Wholes, in James G. Hart and Lester Embree Phenomenology of Values and Valuing (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 229230.