Michel Henry

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Michel Henry (born January 10, 1922 in Haiphong , Vietnam , † July 3, 2002 in Albi , France ) was a French philosopher and writer.

Michel Henry, signature 1995

biography

Michel Henry spent his early childhood in French Indochina , that is, in French colonial territory. In 1929, at the age of 7, he came to France with his mother (his father had died in a car accident shortly after his birth). He received his philosophical training in Paris. In the Second World War he was involved in the Resistance . After the war he belonged to the group of French philosophers that Martin Heidegger paid a visit to the Black Forest. From 1960 to 1982 Henry taught at the University of Montpellier . In addition to his philosophical work, Henry also published four novels that, like his early main philosophical work ( L'essence de la manifestation , 1963) - apart from the part that deals with the thinking of Meister Eckhart - have not been translated into German to date .

philosophy

Michel Henry is the founder of a phenomenology of life , which is sometimes referred to as "(radical) life phenomenology" or "material phenomenology of life".

Henry developed his phenomenological approach on the basis of a criticism of the classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl : The one-sided focus on intentionality , that is, on the relationship between the act of consciousness of appearance and the object appearing in it ("intentional"), led to the original appearance ("Phenomenalization") - and thus at the same time the primordial phenomenon of life - to miss. Accordingly, the criticism of Husserl consists in the fact that classical phenomenology, with its unquestioned presupposition of holding the intentionality of consciousness as the original place of appearance, neglects precisely the actual reality of appearance before all intentionality and thus its ontological task, the reality of the To clarify appearance, reveals. Henry opposes this “world phenomenality”, in which every thing that appears is leveled to something purely intentionally seen and thereby robbed of its reality, with the original “life phenomenality”: The appearance of life is not mediated through an intentional reference, but happens immediately and immanently. The original phenomenalization does not consist in the fact that life gives itself to a consciousness in an objective way, but that life gives itself directly to itself without the "light" of a conscious reflection intervening.

Henry's phenomenological concept of life must not be misunderstood biologically : “Life” does not mean living nature as the object of biology, but rather a direct phenomenon that precedes all scientific and everyday experience of objectivity, the human being who makes this philosophical reflection first experiences in oneself, namely in the way in which he appears to himself: the original appearance of man does not lie in a reflexive return to me (in that I make myself an object of myself), but rather in an immediate being-given to myself, i.e. in an appearance that is not within the power of the subject. It is this instance of the original appearance that Henry calls "life".

Michel Henry concretized the outlined basic insight that pervades his entire philosophical, essayistic and literary work in very different forms and applied it to a wide variety of topics and problems, including questions of culture , religion and abstract art .

Works

Philosophical works published during his lifetime

  • L'Essence de la manifestation (1963), engl. The Essence of Manifestation , Martinus Nijhoff, 1973; Springer, 2004, German partial translation of the paragraphs on Meister Eckhart in: Rolf Kühn / Sébastien Laoureux (eds.), Meister Eckhart - knowledge and mysticism of life. Research contributions in life phenomenology. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-495-48288-9 . Pp. 13-102.
  • Philosophy et Phénoménologie du corps (1965), engl. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body , Springer, 1975
  • Marx:
    • I. Une philosophie de la réalité (1976)
    • II. Une philosophie de l'économie (1976)
    • engl. Marx: a Philosophy of Human Reality , Indiana University Press, 1993
  • Généalogie de la psychanalysis. Le commencement perdu (1985), engl. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis , Stanford University Press, 1993
  • La Barbarie (1987), dt. The barbarism. A phenomenological criticism of culture . Translated from the French and introduced by Rolf Kühn and Isabelle Thireau. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1994. ISBN 978-3-495-47769-4
  • Radical Life Phenomenology. Selected studies on phenomenology . Translated from the French, edited and introduced by Rolf Kühn. Foreword by Jean-Luc Marion. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1992. ISBN 978-3-495-47737-3
  • C'est moi la Vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (1996), dt. I am the truth. For a philosophy of Christianity . Translated from the French by Rolf Kühn. Preface by Rudolf Bernet. Verlag Karl Alber Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1997. ISBN 978-3-495-47856-1
  • Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair (2000), German incarnation. A philosophy of the flesh. Verlag Karl Alber , Freiburg / Munich 2002. ISBN 978-3-495-48051-9
  • Affect and subjectivity. Life phenomenological contributions to psychology and the essence of humans . Translated from the French by Rolf Kühn. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2005. ISBN 978-3-495-48099-1

Literary works

  • Le Jeune Officier (1954)
  • L'Amour les yeux fermés (1976)
  • Le Fils du Roi (1981)
  • Le Cadavre indiscreet (1996)

Posthumous works

  • Paroles du Christ (2002), German words of Christ. A phenomenology of language and revelation . Translated from the French by Maurice de Coulon. Afterword by Rolf Kühn. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-495-48396-1
  • Auto-donation. Entretiens et conférences (2002)
  • Le bonheur de Spinoza (2003)
  • Phenomenology de la vie:
    • Tome I. De la phenomenology (2003)
    • Tome II. De la subjectivité (2003)
    • Tom III. De l'art et du politique (2003)
    • Tome IV. Sur l'éthique et la religion (2004)
  • Entretiens (2005), Éditions Sulliver
  • Le socialisme selon Marx (2008), Editions Sulliver

literature

  • Emil Angehrn , Julia Scheidegger: Metaphysics of the Individual. Michel Henry's interpretation of Marx and its relevance. Alber, Freiburg and Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-495-48506-4
  • Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska: Michel Henry, un philosophe de la vie et de la praxis . Vrin, Paris 1980.
  • Sebastian Knöpker, Michel Henry - an introduction, with an essay by Rolf Kühn on Michel Henry's novels . onomato Verlag, Düsseldorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-942864-16-9
  • Rolf Kühn , corporeality as vitality. Michel Henry's phenomenology of absolute subjectivity as affectivity . Alber, Freiburg and Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-495-48087-8
  • Rolf Kühn, Stefan Nowotny (eds.), Michel Henry. For the self-development of life and culture . Alber, Freiburg and Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-495-48061-8
  • Julia Scheidegger, Radical Hermeneutics. Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Life . Alber, Freiburg and Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-495-48519-4
  • Marco A. Sorace:  Michel Henry. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 26, Bautz, Nordhausen 2006, ISBN 3-88309-354-8 , Sp. 689-693.
  • Marco A. Sorace: The Word and the Words. Michel Henry's Philosophy of Language and Christian Meditation . In: meditation. Journal for Christian Spirituality and Lifestyle , ISSN  0171-3841 , vol. 36 (2010), issue 3, pp. 20-23.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Henry, Michel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Haiphong , Vietnam
DATE OF DEATH July 3, 2002
Place of death Albi , France