Seeing the Invisible, Feeling the Visible: Michel Henry on Aesthetics and Abstraction

Abstract

Seeing the Invisible, Feeling the Visible: Michel Henry on Aesthetics and Abstraction Davide Zordan The Romantic conviction that art can save religious experience from its weakness and dogmatic entanglements represented, despite some ambiguities, a real chance for theological thinking. Yet it is not art itself, but its effects, or better its capacity to strengthen our will to life (art as “the great stimulant to life,” in Nietzsche's words) that attracted Romantic minds and persuaded them to focus on the problem of sensibility, or aesthetics. And thus in Romantic Idealism, aesthetics was identified as a fundamental paradigm of reflection, not only with regard to art, but as a valuable model for the interpretation of human experience as a whole, also including the religious sphere. What has remained of this Romantic enterprise? Not very much that might be immediately useful for theological purposes. The aesthetic paradigm maintains its significance for religious analysis, but it has to be restated in more secular terms and in a more nuanced way today. Now phenomenology, and French phenomenology in particular, has replaced romantic–idealistic aesthetics, developing important reflections on the subject of religious experience, as well and going so far as being accused of a sort of “theological turn.” One of those phenomenologists, and maybe the one most blamed for his theological leanings, is Michel Henry. In this paper, I will discuss his thoughts about art as a “culture of sensibility” and about aesthetics as a philosophical perspective on the transcendental conditions of human experience. In his critical essay on Wassily Kandinsky, published in 1988, Henry outlines an aesthetic theory that emerges from his phenomenology of life. He is persuaded to find, in Kandinsky's writings more than in his art, a confirmation of the validity of his own philosophical thought. Thus, in the first section, I will briefly recall some of its characteristic elements, before discussing in detail his aesthetic reflections inspired by Kandinsky, followed by a critical evaluation. In my conclusion, I will suggest a possible theological use of Henry's phenomenological approach as an adequate argument for the importance of the senses and of sensibility for religious experience. A radical phenomenology or the quest for appearance as such According to Henry, a foundational discourse in philosophy must put the pathic dimension of human sensibility at the center of its phenomenological investigations. Such an investigation does not study the wide range of empirically observable feelings and emotions, but exclusively the conditions that make these human feelings and emotions capable to qualify every experience of our lives in a specific way. In Henry's view, the essence or truth of every manifestation, in other words what makes possible the giving of phenomena to us, is exactly that which cannot be given as a phenomenon in the exterior space and in the dynamic of intentionality: instead, it is the immanent feeling of a radical interiority. What does this mean practically for human experience? After all we have a tendency to imagine the human subject as given in itself, independently from its pathic dimension. In a very general way, we envisage all what a subject “feels” as “something” which can manifest itself in causing the subject to be exalted or depressed, as a sort of addition to the “center” of the individual, at most as an ephemeral coloration of an idea of the subject which itself is thought to be affectively neutral or static. Thus, we imagine a representation of the human being that seems altogether consistent with the idea of the autonomy of the subject, of its equidistance from all the affective possibilities inherent in its being sentient. Now, in Henry's thought, this is not only a partial representation, but an illusory and essentially insincere one. This representation is based upon a confusion between sensibility (the power of feeling something and being affected by it) and affectivity (the ontological ground of every feeling that is expressed, which lies in auto‐affection). The affective tones do not refer at all to the sphere of our sensibility, do not “occur” in a subject like entities coming from elsewhere and passing through the subject modifying it, but they take place as the original manifestation of the subject...