To Hear the Sound of One’s Own Birth: Michel Henry on Religious Experience

Abstract

The article consists of two parts. The first part outlines two conceptions of religious experience that can be found in the last three philosophical books of Michel Henry: the first, broad conception of religious experience is connected with the transcendental relation of human self to God as proposed by Henry; the second, narrower conception concerns the story of salvation as told in Henry’s Christian trilogy, and acquires the form of the “second birth.” Yet the transcendental disposition of Henry’s phenomenology prevents it from developing hermeneutical tools that would guide the understanding of religious experience. The second part of the article deals with the critique of Dominique Janicaud, who questioned the phenomenological methodology of Michel Henry precisely because of its religious overtone, and with the subsequent discussion incited by Janicaud’s criticism. The article defends the phenomenological status of Henry’s work by arguing that Henry’s thinking could not be rightly accused from being theological or metaphysical at the time of the publication of Janicaud’s first critique. Yet it is true that the later Christian trilogy identified the general structures of appearing with the inner life of the God of the Christian Bible, and the experience of Christian faith thus became the presupposition of Henry’s phenomenology. The article also argues that religious experience belongs to the field of phenomenological research.