Abstract
Immanence has been defined by reference to transcendence and through the exclusion of the latter from its internal structure. The positive meaning of such a definition was shown with the making evident of the essential structural determinations that it comprises. Before pursuing further the analysis of these structures and the understanding of their character decisive for an adequate philosophical interpretation of the ultimate nature of the essence, it is important to note what has already been achieved, in a purely negative way, from this exclusion.
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References
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree. (London: George Ball and Sons, 1888) 78.
Cf. supra, chapter 9.
It may be that unreality or more exactly, its inclusion in the essence, does not constitute an obstacle to existence and to the grasp of a totality: “The phenomenon of the ‘not-yet’ has been taken over from the ‘almost-itself’; no more than the care-structure in general, can it serve as a higher court which would rule against the possibility of an existent Being-a-whole;”. [Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 303]. It is this anticipation of self which rather constitutes, according to Heidegger, the possibility for Dasein’s arriving at the grasp of its totality, and this because the stream which anticipates its ultimate and final possibility, and which is absolutely insurpassable, reveals at the same time “all the possibilities which lie ahead of that possibility.” (Ibid. 309). The totality thus revealed by the anticipatory stream must, nevertheless, be understood for what it is and as that which at the same time constitutes the foundation of the possibility of revelation, it must be understood as finitude. Actually, it is the finitude of the horizon which constitutes the ontological meaning of the being-unto-death or better is identical to it. The outlook cast upon human existence in its totality by being-unto-death is thus nothing other than this very finitude, and for this reason, it develops itself entirely on the level of unreality. In other words, the totality here in question is a totality, understood as arising interior to the anticipatory act of transcendence and as the very horizon of the latter. It has nothing to do with the reality of the essence such that the possibility of the essence’s forming in itself a totality and of being grasped as such is not even taken into consideration and in no way constitutes the problem posed.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 275.
Ibid.
Franz Kafka, Journal intime. (Paris: Grasset, 1945) 253.
Franz Kafka, Diaries—1914–1923, tr. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1965) 206.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sammtliche Werke V. (Berlin: Veit, 1845) 512. [Henry’s italics]
Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. 294.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, tr. Walter Lowrie, 2 ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) 128.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, in Sammtliche Werke, V. (Berlin: Veit, 1845) 541.
Ibid.
Ibid. 409.
Ibid. 545.
Ibid. 541.
Ibid. 442.
Ibid. 443.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 542–43 [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 452.
Ibid. 540–1. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 442.
Ibid. 444.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 445.
Ibid. 481.
John 1:18.
Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben. 486. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 443.
Ibid. 452. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 543. Nevertheless, what follows in the text shows that—as our analysis will establish—the impossibility of seeing the absolute cannot be the ‘fac’ of man, but stems from the very nature of vision, such as Fichte understands it. This is why it finally becomes evident the absolute, God himself cannot see himself such as he is, any more than man can: “He Himself is hidden to Himself through this his eye.” (Ibid.)
Ibid. 483.
Ibid. 554. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 551–567.
Ibid. 471. [Henry’s italics]
Cf. supra, chapter 14.
Cf. supra, chapter 8.
Meister Eckhart. A Modern Translation, tr. Raymond B. Blakney. (New York: Harper & Row-The Cloister Library, 1941) 224. [Henry’s italics]
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 252.
Meister Eckhart. A Modern Translation, tr. Raymond B. Blakney. 126.
Ibid. 231.
Ibid. 224. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 231.
Ibid. 232.
Meister Eckhart. Selected Treatises and Sermons, tr. James M. Clark & John V. Skinner. (London: Collins-The Fontana Library, 1963) 193 [cf. ibid., note 2]
Ibid.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 224.
Ibid. 224–225.
Ibid. 229. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 230.
Ibid. 230–231. [Henry’s italics]
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 248.
Ibid. 242.
Ibid.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 142.
Ibid. 148.
Ibid. 132.
Ibid. 169.
Cf. for example, ibid. 134.
Ibid. 135.
Ibid. 190.
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 126. [Henry’s italics]
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 77.
Ibid.
Ibid. 231.
Ibid. 232.
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 242.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 78. [Henry’s italics]
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 239. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 132.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 181. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Ibid. 127.
Ibid. 229. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 54. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 207. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 78. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 226.
Ibid. 200–201. [Henry’s italics]
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 250.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 226.
Ibid.
Ibid. 228.
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 248.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 226.
Ibid. 142.
Ibid. 81.
Ibid. 214. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 60–61. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 200. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 59.
Ibid. 190–191.
Ibid. 195.
Ibid. 126.
Ibid. 225.
Ibid. 127.
Ibid. 231. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 182. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 228.
Ibid. 200.
Ibid. 134.
Ibid. 37.
Ibid. 229.
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 233.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 153.
Ibid. 160.
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 196.
Maître Eckhart, Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 196. [Henry’s italics]
Meister Eckhart. Selected Treatises and Sermons, tr. James M. Clark & John V. Skinner. (London: Collins-The Fontana Library, 1963) 244.
Meister Eckhart. A Modern Translation, tr. Raymond B. Blakney. (New York: Harper & Row-The Cloister Library, 1941) 200. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 50. John 17: 3.
Ibid. 165.
Ibid. 142.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 129.
Ibid. 214–215. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 67–68.
Ibid. 17.
Ibid. 215–216; John 15: 15.
John 4: 22.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 167.
Ibid. 79.
Ibid. 74.
Ibid. 79. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 216. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 80.
Ibid. 148.
Ibid. 141.
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 193.
Ibid. 243. “Let your soul stay where it belongs,” says Eckhart again, “and then everything will be with you.”, tr. R. Blakney, 135.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 190.
Ibid. 135.
Ibid. 180.
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 249. [Henry’s italics]
Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 261–266.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 767.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 203. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner. 210–211. [Henry’s italics; however, the italicized phrase appears in the French but not in the English translation]
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 142–3.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 142.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith. (New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1962) 250.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 393. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. T. Malick. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 109.
Ibid. 105.
Ibid. 109–111.
Ibid. 119.
Ibid. 129. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 111.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 271.
Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons. 129–131.
Ibid.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 330.
Ibid. 331.
Ibid. 329. “Seiend ist das ‘Dasein’ geworfens, ‘nicht’ von ihm selbst in sein Da gebracht.”
Ibid. 330. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Ibid. 331.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. The ambiguity of Nichtigkeit is not merely that of Geworfenheit, it also affects the Heideggerian concept of finitude. Actually, the latter does not simply concern itself with the effective projection of various possibilities, it also affects the act of transcendence considered as a foundation. That the accomplishment of such an act be not within the power of transcendence itself, this is what is presented in Vom Wesen des Grundes as the reason for which “We must clarify the essence of the finitude of Dasein in terms of the constitutive features of its Being.”
M. Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. Terrence Malick. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 131. Insofar as such a finitude is thus explicitly related to the not-being-a-foundation for itself of the foundation-Being of Dasein, its concept necessarily escapes the philosophy of transcendence and far from characterizing the concrete mode according to which the latter works itself out, it rather designates the end of its power, the reign of the anti-essence. But because the very idea of finitude retains, in Heidegger, and with good reason, an essential relation to the mode of founding which belongs to transcendence, the ultimate meaning here perceived, and which actually makes the end of all finitude is also immediately related to transcendence and consequently completely forgotten.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 331. “Dasein as such is guilty.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. 332.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 419.
Ibid. 142.
Ibid. 391.
Ibid. 376.
Ibid. 416.
Ibid. 390.
Ibid. 400.
Ibid. 396.
Ibid. 333.
Ibid. 437.
Ibid. 443. “In the fateful repetition of possibilities that have been, Dasein brings itself back ‘immediately’—i.e. in a way that is temporally ecstatical—to what has already been before it. But when its heritage is thus handed down to itself, its ‘birth’ is caught up into its existence in coming back from the possibility of death (the possibility which is not to be outstripped), if only so that this existence may accept the thrownness of its own ‘there’ in a way which is more free from Illusion.” (Ibid. 442–43) [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 436.
Ibid. 330, 434.
Ibid. 373. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 346.
Ibid. 355.
Ibid.
Ibid. 346.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. T. Malick. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 39.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) 235.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 556. [Henry’s italics]
Heidegger, Being and Time. 336.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 390. note 1.]
“As this kind of reason, however, freedom is the ‘abyss’ of Dasein.” Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. Terrence Malick. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 127–128.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 109.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 116: “The fact that is has such an involvement is ontologically definitive for the Being of such an entity, and is not an ontical assertion about it.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 554.
Ibid. 436.
F. Jeanson, Le Problème Moral et la Pensée de Sartre, 342. (Paris: Editions du Myrte, 1947) 342.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 176–77.
Ibid. 118. [Miss Barnes neglected to translate part of this phrase.]
Ibid. 494.
Ibid. 508.
Ibid. 550–51.
Ibid. 488. We shall note, as a further indication of this confusion that if in this passage contingency characterizes the in-itself, then as we have seen, it is no longer the in-itself or a being, but liberty itself which, to the extent that it appears as the foundation, without foundation, claims to be the very essence of this contingency. In the same way, facticity at one time designates (in a statement previously cited) the in-itself and at another time it designates the internal structure of liberty itself. For example, p. 529: “We find here again that condemnation to freedom which we defined above as facticity.”
Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, II, tr. E.B. Ashton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 109.
Ibid. 109–111;
cf. M. Dufrenne et P. Ricceur, Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’Existence. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1947) 180.
Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie…383.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy of Perception, tr. Colin Smith. (New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1962) 42.
Ibid. xiv.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 141: “Seeing and hearing are distance-senses [Fernsinne] not because they are far-reaching, but because it is in them that Dasein as deservant mainly dwells.”
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 254.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, tr. A. Fischer. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 181.
Heidegger, Being and Time. 181.
Ibid. 402. In another text: “Both the disclosedness of the ‘there’ and Dasein’s basic existentiell possibilities, authenticity and inauthenticity, are founded upon temporality.” (401) “Because temporality is ecstatico-horizonally constitutive for the clearedness of the ‘there’ temporality is always primordially interprétable in the ‘there’ and is accordingly familiar to us.” (460) [Heidegger’s italics]
Cf. supra, chapters 30 and 31.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. von Hellingrath, F. Seebass, L. von Pigenot. IV, (Berlin: 1923ff) 246.
I John 4: 12.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sammtliche Werke, V, (Berlin: Veit, 1845) 486. Cf. supra, chapter 38, note 18.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 399–400.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben. 486.
“An analytic of Dasein must, from the beginning, strive to uncover the Dasein in man according to that mode of Being which, by nature, maintains Dasein and its comprehension of Being in forgetfullness… This mode of Being of Dasein—decisive only from the point of view of a fundamental ontology—we call ‘everydayness’ [Alltäglichkeit].” M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) 242–243.
Ibid. 241.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, 87
Ibid. 89.
Ibid. 90.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1962) 376–377.
Ibid. 165.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 377. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 138, note 2. [Henry’s italics]
E. Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, tr. P. Ricœur. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 92, note of Paul Ricœur.
Tran Duc Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique. (Paris: Minh-Tân, 1951) 178.
E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. D. Cairns. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) 13.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 100.
Ibid. 347.
Ibid. 396.
Ibid. 58. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 238.
Ibid. 369.
Ibid. 58.
E. Fink, “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik”, in Kantstudien, XXXVIII. 3/4. 1933. 346.
G. Berger, Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl, (Paris: Aubier, 1941) 58. [Henry’s italics]
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 238. [Henry’s italics]. The presupposition of monism is obvious here.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 81
242.
Ibid. 238.
“…by saying that this intentionality is not a thought, [we mean] that it does not come into being through the transparency of any consciousness, but takes for granted all the latent knowledge of itself that my body ossesses.” M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 233.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 328.
Ibid. 330.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 199.
Cf. for example, M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 326: “Beforehand I knew obscurely that my gaze was the medium and instrument of comprehensive perception, and the pebble appeared to me in the full light of day in opposition to the concentrated darkness of my bodily organs.” [Henry’s italics] —Elsewhere we have described this insertion of immanence in night, confused more or less with the unconsciousness of something or other, and the correlative creation of the great philosophical mythologies, such as that of transcendental unconsciousness, for example. Cf. our Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), chap. 1.
These confusions and, on the other hand, their origin which resides in the phenomenological status of the original body as immanent body are obvious in the following text, for example: “The body by itself, the body at rest is merely an obscure mass, and we perceive it as a precise and identifiable being when it moves towards a thing, and in so far as it is intentionally projected outwards, and even then this perception is never more than incidental and marginal to consciousness, the centre of which is occupied with things and the world.” M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 322.—In the same fashion, it is a marginal body, a first transcendent level of sensibility constituted by sensations which accompany the accomplishment of movement and not the original Being of this movement, viz. the immanent body, of which Sartre actually speaks in the previously-cited propositions which present the body as “inapprehensible,” “neglected,” “passed by in silence,” and so forth. Cf. supra, notes 34 and 35.
“The knower,” says Sartre, “…is not apprehensible.” Being and Nothingness, 177.
What is outside, according to Schelling, is that which is unconsciously produced by the ego. The world, in a general way, appears objective to consciousness only insofar as it exists without its participation, i.e. produced by an unconscious transcendental act. Thus knowledge is explained; it is the agreement which takes place, according to traditional thought, between the notion and the object, an agreement which “is unexplainable without a primitive identity whose principle necessarily lies beyond consciousness.” Friedrich von Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, in Sammtliche Werke, III (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cottascher, 1858), 506. In the same way, there takes place the union between freedom and necessity which creates history. “History” is possible only through “the union of freedom and necessity…through my freedom and, in the measure that I believe myself to be acting freely, there must be produced, without my being aware of it i.e. without my participation, something which I do not foresee…” Whence “the need for remaining entirely tranquil concerning the results of my action.” F. Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, 593
594
595; whence destiny, providence, and finally congeniality which is the union of genius and the inconscious activity which creates the world
cf. Ibid. 616.
These theses, because they are ultimately based in the universal ontological structure of reality, are obviously not peculiar to Schelling. We find them everywhere, more or less clearly formulated, together with their positive meaning, e.g. in this proposition of Lachelier: “To maintain that this perception (for example, of a movement) intervenes… between consciousness and its object is to claim that this object remains in itself foreign to consciousness and to deny the very fact, which one claims to explain.” Psychologie et Métaphysique, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949) 21, which is echoed in this text of Merleau-Ponty from his Phenomenology of Perception: “…children look, not at their hand, but at the object…” 149. On the other hand, we find the simply negative meaning of these theses in the otherwise absurd conceptions of the American Neo-realists, who posit unconsciousness of the knowledge of the object, the posteriority of consciousness with respect to knowledge, conceptions which were taken up again, at least partially, by certain commentators of Freud in support of their doctrine of the unconscious. Cf. Dalbiez, La méthode psychanalytique et la doctrine freudienne, II. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949) 10.
Friedrich von Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, in Sammtliche Werke, III. (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cottascher, 1858) 345.
Ibid. 403.
“Of itself, intuition,” said Schelling, “loses itself in the object.” Ibid. 345.
Cf. supra, chap. 14.
Friedrich von Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, III, 345
631.
As G. Berger correctly points out in Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl, (Paris: Aubier, 1941) 123: “Even with Kant, the transcendental…does not characterize a certain region of being, for example, that of the a priori.” This is why this ‘pure’ region which should define the domain of ontology is not something real, in the sense that Kant could not make a phenomenon of it, viz. an object of “direct apprehension,” it is posited only by “critical reflection.” “It is not the revelation of an absolute reality, such as that of an act, it is the bringing to evidence of the a priori conditions without which no knowledge would be possible.” “This philosophical elaboration” takes place “in the world.” G. Berger, Le cogito, 124. Ultimately this is how we explain that the Kantian subject is not “proven” but “admitted.”
Ibid. 127.
We find a remarkable example of this mythology in Bénézé, L’allure du transcendental, (Paris: Vrin, 1936). Frequently, it is when a type of thought becomes weak and no longer offers anything of itself in the movement of history that an external formulation of what constituted its original intentions and that the insufficiencies and lacunae in these intentions come to light. This is what is of interest in the book here alluded to and in which we see developping to the point of the most obvious absurdity the consequences which result in the philosophy of the spirit from the original dissimulation of this spirit and at the same time from the incapacity of the problematic to recognize in it a foundation in the essence. “We cannot grasp transcendental consciousness itself,” affirms Bénézé, L’allure du transcendental, 18, which leads him to declare with regard to that which nevertheless constitutes the foundation of all knowledge, viz. the absolute, that it is this “absolute,” that it is “indubitable,” and this even though it is not known, that it is not a “consciousness” (“Transcendental consciousness alone is absolute, not insofar as it is conscious, but insofar as it is indubitable,”
Bénézé, 259–260, and again that “transcendental consciousness is not a consciousness,”
Bénézé, 244) and, at the same time and doubtless for the same reason, that it is no more than a “didactic fiction,” and it is merely because of this that it should be kept
Bénézé, 11, and that otherwise “it is not permissible for us to call consciousness that which escapes the cartesian doubt.”
Bénézé, 94. Between these extreme as well as absurd and contradictory affirmations, there is situated a whole series of classical propositions according to which the transcendental is no more than a “form, an empty category,”
Ibid. 261, an “impersonal transcendental form because it is empty,”
Ibid. 268 etc. Because transcendental consciousness is unknown in itself, the problem of its analysis, of a “transcendental analysis of consciousness,”
Ibid. 17, arises as the problem of a method. This method consists in “surprising consciousness with regard to the knower and the known.”
Ibid. 93. “It will be…through the introspective examination of empirical consciousness associated with the observation of the world that we will grasp transcendental activity.”
Ibid. 13. We will seek the reflection of constructive power in the world and in its organized structures and we will try to grasp in it ‘the allure of the transcendental’. The determination of the transcendental starting with empirical consciousness will be able to take place in the same way “on condition that we know how to transpose to the transcendental level what surprises us on the empirical level.”
Ibid. 13. “Transcendental consciousness is empirical consciousness raised to the dignity of the absolute.”
Ibid. 94. Bénézé further states and according to him, when all is said and done, it is a question of “hypostazing the insufficiency of the world in the transcendental,” so that “the transcendental is that which is not empirical, but through default and the insufficiency of the world,” even though we can “find nothing relative ‘legislated’ about the absolute.”
Ibid. 21. Doubtless, all these difficulties explain why one of its creations is finally substituted for this strange transcendental consciousness, viz. the subject, a construct, though we do not know how (“we do not care to know how this notion is constructed, i.e. how we pass from transcendental consciousness to its creations,”
Ibid. 237) even though the theory of this construction is partially given—“the subject appears as an ensemble of objects grouped around one of them, i.e. the body, which plays the role of substance,”
Ibid. 257—which theory, however, is not itself exempt from contradictions, because the text just cited adds that we must get rid of the substance of the subject as we have gotten rid of the substance of the object. That the theses here defended by Bénézé are not isolated instances and consequently that the parallelism which arises between classical and so-called existential philosophy is not simply a matter of fact, we see by comparing, for example, what has been said with what a commentator of Jean-Paul Sartre writes when he speaks to us of “the nihilating bursting-forth of a transcendental consciousness outside of Being whose internal action is revealed only in the appearance of the world.”
G. Varet, L’ontologie de Sartre, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948) 61. [Henry’s italics]. That it cannot be ‘revealed’, or as Bénézé says ‘surprised’ except in this indirect way stems from the fact that the essence does not show itself in itself, that “nothingness is…anti-phenomenological.”
G. Varet, L’ontologie de Sartre, 171. This explains “the existential taboo of existence as meta-problematic.”
Ibid. 135. Because ‘nihilation’ is the essence of existence which does not show itself, “the only thing to do is to describe the result of this ‘nihilation’.”
Ibid. 62.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sammtliche Werke, V (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 457. [Henry’s italics]
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 265.
Ibid. 268. [Henry’s italics]
F. Kafka, Journal intime, tr. P. Klossowski (Paris: Grasset, 1945) 300.
“I am always getting lost; it is a forest trail.” F. Kafka, Journal intime, 224.
Ibid. 290.
“We have been chased from paradise, but this does not mean that paradise has been destroyed.” F. Kafka, Journal intime, 302.
Ibid. 304.
Ibid. 269. [Henry’s italics]
F. Kafka, Préparatifs de noce à la campagne, (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) 301. “The internal law,” Kafka says further, “…is not communicable because it is not able to be grasped and for this reason it does not lend itself to being communicated.” Journal intime, 306–307.
“Heaven,” namely, the world, “is mute,” says Kafka, “it is no more than the echo of what is mute.” Journal intime, 299.
Luke 24: 5.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 124.
F. Kafka, Journal intime, 298.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, 274.
S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, tr. Walter Lowrie. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941) 160–161.
St. Augustine, Confessions, XI, ch. 14, in Greak Books of the Western World, XVIII, ed. Robert M. Hutchins. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britanica Inc., 1952) 93.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sammtliche Werke, V (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 568.
Concerning the primitive fact of Christianity: “This fact is metaphysically transformed by a use of the understanding which transcends the same fact when a man sets himself to understand the reason for it and for this purpose constructs an hypothesis on how the individual Jesus, as an individual, proceeds from the divine essence.” Ibid. 569.
Ibid. 570.
Ibid. 573.
Ibid. 572–573.
Ibid. 572. That the impossibility of arriving at the essence by means of knowledge does not presuppose the non-existence of the essence, but is rather rooted in the positivity of its internal structure, Kafka, a religious thinker, had to recognize in his own way. Thus we see that in his Diary, at the very moment when the failure of all human investigation is expressly attributed to the essence, the necessity of basing the effective possibility of arriving at the essence on the essence itself and as identical to this essence becomes clear. Such a possibility based on the structure of the essence can henceforth be understood by beginning with its radical opposition to knowledge, and the type of thought which allows itself to be led by the essence itself re-discovers the metaphysical and religious meaning of the ‘means’ which belonged to religion from the beginning, it discovers the meaning of religious techniques, while at the same time and for this reason, the essence reveals itself to this type of thought, the essence of reality and of life “which all positive knowledge necessarily despises.” Speaking of this, Kafka says that it is “spread out around everyone in its fullness, but veiled in its depth and in visible… It is in no way hostile, refractory or deaf. If called forth by the proper word, by its true name, it comes. This is the characteristic of a magic which does not create but invokes.” Journal intime, 11.
Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1900) 21
76.
Ibid. 206
143–144.
Ibid. 253.
R. Descartes, Essential Works of Descartes, tr. Lowell Bair. (New York: Bantam Books, 1961) 220.
Such is, in our opinion, the radical meaning of the critique of reason inaugurated by Pascal, viz. the opposition between reason and a nature to which recourse is made as to a foundation; cf. Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Lafuma-Delmas, 1952) 246.
Cf. K. Jaspers, Descartes und die Philosophie, 3 ed. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1956) 65–67.
Karl Jaspers, Philosophy. II, tr. E.B. Ashton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 172.
“To be faithful to myself,” M. Dufrenne and P. Ricœur can say in their commentary, “always means to dare, because I never know what I am” Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’Existence, (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1947) 150. [Henry’s italics]
S. Kierkegaard in his Concept of Dread, tr. Walter Lowrie, 2 ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) 20
35, already noted that psychology cannot account for the qualitative leap because the latter takes place in an ontological dimension radically different from the one wherein psychology moves about. The impotence of psychology, and of knowledge in general, has not only been asserted by Kierkegaard (this is the meaning of his thesis according to which it is contradictory to want to afflict oneself with guilt in the area of ‘aesthetics’, cf. The Concept of Dread, 13), but contrary to what has been repeated in the wake of certain statements made by Heidegger [cf. infra, chapter 70, note 23] his thesis is also accompanied by an implicit definition of a positive ontology of subjectivity, an ontology which in the philosophy of existence plays the role of an essential foundation and which consequently prevents it from degenerating into literature and word-games or, as we will see, into the emptiness and confusion of a certain ‘irrationalism’.
M. Dufrenne and P. Ricœur, Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’Existence, (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1947) 262.
Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, III, tr. E.B. Ashton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) 205.
“It is thus not in any of the modes of being that lend themselves to objectively articulated thought…But if something appears to itself in existence, whatever is can be for it only in the form of consciousness, and in consequence, with Existenz tied to existence, the being of transcendence too assumes for Existenz the form of objective being.” Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, III, tr. E.B. Ashton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) 7. We see that, for Jaspers, consciousness and objective knowledge are two identical terms. [Ashton’s translation differs considerably from the French translation which Michel Henry used, transl. note]
“An object that is such a phenomenon must be evanescent for consciousness, since it is not extant being but the language of transcendent being.” Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, III, 15.
And again: “Immanent transcendence is an immanence that has instantly vanished again, and it is a transcendence that has come to exist as the language of a cipher.” Ibid. III, 120. Concerning the claim to grasp the manifestation of the essence in the disappearance of the entity, cf. infra, chapters 71 ff.
Cf. M. Guéroult, Etendue et Psychologie chez Malebranche. (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1939), leçons VIII–XIII.
Meister Eckhart. A Modern Translation, tr. Raymond B. Blakney. (New York: Harper & Row—The Cloister Library, 1941) 127.
Ibid. 166.
Ibid. 140; I Tim. 6: 16.
Ibid. 133.
Ibid. 198.
Meister Eckhart. Selected Treatises and Sermons, tr. James M. Clark & John V. Skinner. (London: Collins-The Fontana Library, 1963) 245.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney. 149.
“Multiplicity is already there in what little we know of the Godhead,” says Eckhart. Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 249.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 199; John 16: 7.
Ibid. 199.
Maître Eckhart, Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 248.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 229.
Ibid. 169.
Ibid. 232.
Ibid. 231.
Ibid. 182.
“What is life? God’s being is my life.” Ibid. 180.
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, 249. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 226.
Maître Eckhart. Traités et Sermons, 249.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 9.
“That God,” says Eckhart, speaking of the real God who is not the one about whom man can or cannot think, “will not vanish.” Ibid. 9.
Meister Eckhart, tr. James Clark & John Skinner, 249.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 23.
Meister Eckhart, tr. J. Clark & J. Skinner, 249.
“What is inborn in me remains.” Ibid.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 201. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 160; Psalm 36: 10.
Ibid. 168.
Ibid. 131. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 44.
Ibid. 231.
Maître Eckhart, Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 117.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 131.
Ibid.
Cf. supra, chapter 40.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 80.
Ibid. 206.
Ibid. 81.
Ibid. 129.
Ibid. 81.
Ibid. 131.
Ibid. 50.
Ibid. 229 [Henry’s italics]; cf. supra, chapter 39.
Maître Eckhart, Traités et Sermons, tr. anon. (Paris: Aubier, 1942) 251.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 229.
Ibid. 129.
Ibid. 79.
“Then it is quite still in the essence of God, not knowing at all where it is, knowing nothing but God.” Ibid.
Meister Eckhart, tr. R. Blakney, 79-80. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 130; Gen. 28: 16.
Ibid. 29; “Why are you not aware of it?” Eckhart asks elsewhere, “Because you are not at home there.” Ibid. 184.
Ibid. 200. [Henry’s italics]
Cf. supra, chapter 8.
“…we have no other sources of knowledge but these two [sensibility and understanding].” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. F. Max Müller. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1961) 191.
Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Samlede Vaerker, VIII, ed. A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg, H.O. Lange. (Copenhague, 1920–1936) 323.
Meister Eckhart. A Modem Translation, tr. Raymond B. Blakney. (New York: Harper & Row—The Cloister Library, 1941) 214. “…But in the day most native to the soul, it perceives things from above all space and time, and finds them neither near nor far away.” Ibid.
Ibid. 153; Matth. 10: 26.
Ibid. 77; this is Eckhart’s rendition of John 1: 4.
Renouvier, Traité de Psychologie rationelle d’après les principes du criticisme, IL (Paris: Colin, 1912) 107.
Novalis, Hymns to the Night, tr. Charles E. Passage. (New York: The Liberal Arts Press Inc., 1960) 3.
Ibid.
Ibid. 4.
Ibid.
Ibid. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Ibid. 6.
“Dost thou take pleasure in us also, dark Night?” Ibid. 3.
“Der Offenbarungen mächtiger Schoss,” Ibid. 9.
Ibid. 8.
Ibid. 9.
Ibid. 3.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. F. Max Müller. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1961) 591.
E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. Dorion Cairns. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) 319. [Henry’s italics]
It is in this purely formal fashion that Heidegger pursues the ontological elaboration of the most original essence of truth; non-unveiling is the simple presupposition of unveiling; its phenomenological determination thought of under the category of obscurity or of dissimulation results from its dialectical opposition to unveiling and resides therein, “From the point of view of truth conceived as revelation, then, concealment is non-revelation and thus the untruth which is specific of and peculiar to the nature of truth.” M. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, tr. R.F.C. Hull and Alan Crick, in Existence and Being, (London: Vision Press Ltd., 1949) 340. [Henry’s italics].
And again: “Concealment denies revelation to alethea,” Ibid, in such a way that it is in this refusal and through it that concealment is understood and determined for what it is. It is precisely because it is nothing other than the refusal to reveal itself that concealment can take place only at the heart of this revelation and as its refusal, its limit and the law of its effective phenomenological accomplishment, as the errancy whereby it essentially determines the reign of truth and with which it is ultimately identified.
This clarifies, in its ultimate foundation, the insurmountable character of the ascendency of errancy over ontology and the obligation incumbent upon the latter, in the sole issue which makes ontology equal to metaphysics and philosophy itself, of understanding itself and presenting itself as “gazing out of error into the mystery,” Ibid. 347 [Henry’s italics] as “the ‘open resolve’ for the mystery…well on the way to error as such.”
Ibid. Moreover, for this reason, viz. because the obscurity which determines non-truth and confers on it its peculiar ontological positivity is always and in all cases understood starting with the reign of truth and in its dialectical opposition to truth, and what is more, as the very law of its accomplishment and effectiveness, non-truth has nothing to do in principle with the essence thought of in these investigations as the essence of original revelation and grasped as the invisible.
Matth. 22: 21.
Matth. 5: 3–10.
S. Kierkegaard as cited by Jean Wahl in Etudes kierkegaardiennes, (Paris: Aubier), 289.
As Kierkegaard understood so well; cf. The Sickness unto Death, tr. Walter Lowrie. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 156 ff.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 284–286. On Hegel’s critique of Christianity, cf. infra, chapter 73.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888) 259.
Ibid, 257–258.
Concerning our interpretation of sexuality, which is merely outlined here, cf. Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), conclusion.
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Henry, M. (1973). The Internal Structure and the Problem of its Phenomenological Determination: The Invisible. In: The Essence of Manifestation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2391-7_4
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