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Phenomenological life


Phenomenological life (French: vie phénoménologique) is life considered from a philosophical and rigorously phenomenological point of view. The relevant philosophical project is called "radical phenomenology of life" (phénoménologie radicale de la vie) or "material phenomenology of life" (phénoménologie matérielle de la vie).

The philosopher Michel Henry defines life from a phenomenological point of view as that which possesses the faculty and the power "of feeling and experiencing oneself in each point of its being".

For Michel Henry, life is essentially subjective force and affectivity — it consists of a pure subjective experience of oneself which perpetually oscillates between suffering and joy. A "subjective force" is not an impersonal, blind and insensitive force like the objective forces we meet in nature, but a living and sensible force experienced from within and resulting from an inner desire and a subjective effort of the will to satisfy it. Starting from this phenomenological approach to life, in Incarnation, une philosophie de la chair (Incarnation, a Philosophy of the Flesh) Michel Henry establishes a radical opposition between the living flesh endowed with sensibility and the material body, which is in principle insensible.

The word "phenomenological" refers to phenomenology, which is the study of phenomena and a philosophical method which fundamentally concerns the study of phenomena as they appear. What Henry calls "absolute phenomenological life" is the subjective life of individuals reduced to its pure inner manifestation, as we perpetually live it and feel it. It is life as it reveals itself and appears inwardly, its self-revelation: life is both what reveals and what is revealed.

Life is by nature invisible because it never appears in the exteriority of a look; it reveals itself in itself without gap or distance. The fact of seeing does in effect presuppose the existence of a distance and of a separation between what is seen and the one who sees, between the object that is perceived and the subject who perceives it. A feeling, for example, can never be seen from the exterior, it never appears in the "horizon of visibility" of the world; it feels itself and experiences itself from within in the radical immanence of life. Love cannot see itself, any more than hatred; feelings are felt in the secrecy of our hearts, where no look can penetrate.


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