A cryptic theo-phenomenology of the body
Michel Henry teaches that there are two domains of appearance: the world and life. The world is that “Outside” in which things show themselves as external to oneself. Life is the experiencing of oneself without distance or difference, “inside.” Life is more fundamental than the world, since the world is an appearing, and nothing can appear unless there is a life which can feel itself being appeared to.
Everything experienced in the “Outside” of the world has a body. There are the more familiar bodies of sensible things: this cat, that dog, one’s brother or sister or wife or parents. But there are also the “abstract” or “ideal” bodies of realities which appear differently. The number 1 has a body which is different from that of the number 2, and so on.
To say that each thing which appears in the world has a “body” is a way of clarifying the notion that it is a this-such. It is an individual thing with “content.” Every body is particular (this) and it also has a content in virtue of which it is visible and distinct from other bodies (such). The cat is one body, distinct both in particularity and in content from the dog, another body. But catness or felinity, also, is a body, an ideal body, distinct in particularity and content from dogness or caninity.
I am a life, a living thing, un vivant. I am visible to others in the world in virtue of my body, which is an externalization of my inner life. At the same time, my being alive is not an accomplishment of my own, nor is it anything that I can secure, so that I may never die, since I must already be alive in order to do anything. This is how, as Michel Henry writes, I can become aware of my own life as a living thing as a gift given to me as I am engendered in absolute Life, which is God. This life which I feel, on which I depend, which I did not ask for, and over which I have no power — this life is God. If that is so, and if I, though I am a life, nevertheless also have a “phenomenological” body in virtue of which I appear to myself and to others in the world, we can therefore think of the world itself—this entire itself-apparent milieu or stage of appearance, in which everything particular and finite appears—as the phenomenological body of God, the absolute Life.
If I am a finite life which possesses an externally visible phenomenological body, and if the phenomenological body of God the absolute Life is the world itself, then every experience is of God and in God and through God. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
