Henry, Material PhenomenologyIntroduction and Chapter 1
Henry begins by asserting the historical prominence and significance of Husserlian phenomenology, “…what German idealism was to the nineteenth, what empiricism was to the eighteenth, what Descartes was to the seventeenth, what Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus were to scholasticism, what Plato and Aristotle were to antiquity” (1). Phenomenology differs from these other schools and figures in that it is not a philosophy of the past, so in order to achieve its true stature, it must continue to develop, that it, “…be radicalized in such a way that what depends on it would be overturned and, subsequently, everything would in fact be changed” (2).
What is the question which defines phenomenology and which phenomenology’s greatness requires must be radicalized? It is, “…no longer concerned with the phenomena, but with the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not with what appears, but with appearing” (2). The radicalization that Henry proposes, “…seek[s] out the mode according to which [phenomenality] originally becomes a phenomenon…the phenomenologically pure materiality” (Ibid.). Whereas phenomenology in its Husserlian form remains wed to the classical, ecstatic model of phenomenality, Henry’s material phenomenology seeks this pure materiality beyond the visible (cf. p. 2). Beyond the visible, but still capable of designation, this pure materiality is apprehended by Henry as affect, susceptibility, “…the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself,” it is life itself, “the original phenomenalization at the core of being,” which “founds” being (3). Henry gives us a sense of the difference between a phenomenology of consciousness and a material phenomenology (first full ¶ on p. 6).
Chapter 1Hyletic Phenomenology and Material Phenomenology
Henry’s task in this chapter is to characterize the relationship between his radicalization of phenomenology in the form of a material phenomenology and Husserl’s doctrine of Hyle. Consider Henry’s summary of this doctrine on pp. 7-8. As Henry glosses this, for Husserl, the Hyle is characterized both positively and negatively: positively through its inclusion in the sphere of absolute consciousness; negatively, by excluding it from the intentional. This dual definition is the key to the problematic character of the doctrine in Husserl’s phenomenology (and at the same time, the opening to a radicalized material phenomenology). Namely, it opens phenomenology to a fundamental question: which is the phenomenological absolute, the intentional activity of consciousness or the hyletic material upon which that activity operates, “The essential question is which one of these, the non-intentional hyle or the intentional morphe, is subjectivity…” (8)? Henry insists that the answer to this question is ultimately revealed at the eidetic level. We must show, through the method of variation, which one of these is inessential to subjectivity, “With respect to the reality of absolute subjectivity, one must imagine it, in turn, without its material component and without its intentional component in order to see what, if anything subsists each time as the phenomenological residue” (8-9). When we establish which of the two is the fundamental stratum, we’ve found a real foundation: both in the sense that it is truly independent and in as much as everything else is ultimately refers to it.
As we know, Henry’s contention is that it is the hyle which is the essence of subjectivity, “Material phenomenology, as I conceive it, results from a radical reduction of every transcendence that yields the hyletic or impressional component as the underlying essence of subjectivity” (9). Like Husserl, Henry finds precedence for his position in the history of philosophy (though he cites Descartes here, it is really Spinoza who is the modern philosopher from whom he draws the most inspiration). It is not the cogito, however, but the method of radical doubt that he points to, insisting that it is only possible as the ‘letting go’ of the intentional relatedness to the world(and thus the achievement of the hyle independent of morphe) (Ibid.).
Why, we might ask, didn’t Husserl recognize this in his own analysis of the Cartesian path to the reduction? Henry spends a number of pages highlighting both the proximity which Husserl’s thinking established with this insight into the hyletic ground of phenomenology, and the extent to which Husserl shrunk from the implications of this insight, ultimately insisting on a kind of equiprimordiality between the hyletic and intentional components of noesis, an equiprimordiality which Henry argues ultimately reduces the hyletic, non-intentional dimensions of givenness to intentionality (thus apparently deciding in favor of the morphe, over the hyle), making of the hyle a mere fact of the appearance, rather than its impressional basis, “This ejection into the ontological transcendence of morphe signifies a dejection of hyle’s own being into the ontic…” (12). This failure to maintain the true ‘being’ of the hyle is for Henry a philosophical failure, a failure that is to maintain the radicality and integrity of the analysis. It is in part to be explained by Husserl’s tendency to exhibit the specificity of intentional analysis as it operates on the various forms of sense experience (where the impressional basis can be given a empiricistic interpretation as ‘sensibility’). If Husserl had paid sufficient attention to inner experience, particularly the feeling and desiring elements of it, he might have more readily affirmed the fundamental immanence of the impressional (affect and desire, in the immediacy of the lived experience, refer to nothing but themselves). Instead, Husserl reduces the affective and desiring to mere modes of ‘intentive mental processes;” their essence is not feeling or desire, but rather their being as intentional (cf. ¶ on 13).
Husserl’s failure here seems even clearer when, in attempting to account for the particular ‘felt’ character of affective experience, he refers it to the noematic content of the experience. Once again, in this reference we can see Husserl privileging the intentional moment over the non-intentional moment. Intentionality just is this fundamental noetic-noematic correlation. While the focus on perceptual experience covers over this privileging (maybe the ‘felt’ green is ultimately to be accounted for in terms of the noema ‘experienced green’), this is not the case for various non-perceptual experience (e.g., the various affective experiences like fear, anxiety, and desire). The experience of these feelings cannot be correlated with any object. I may be in fear of someone, but the feeling I have is not correlated with the person in the way that my sight of them is correlated with their noematic appearance. More than just a failure, for Henry Husserl’s privileging amounts to a form of violence (see ¶ 14-15).
More than just violence, it is for Henry ultimately a betrayal of the transcendental character of phenomenology. What distinguishes the Husserlian transcendental from the Kantian is the focus on the givenness of experience (as we saw in our consideration of the Kantian/ontological path into the reduction) (see inset quotation 16-17). In as much as Husserl’s subordination of the hyletic moment to the intentional morphe limits givenness to intentional correlation, the transcendental is refigured as the transcendent, “The thing, thought according to the presuppositions of intentionality, is the transcendent thing, the irreal (noema), but it must first be something else that is neither irreal or transcendent, something purely subjective and radically immanent” (17). Husserl, in effect, reduces givenness to the noematic correlate of the noesis, but there is, insists Henry, a more primordial givenness; not the givenness of the transcendent, but a givenness of the very mode of this given transcendence, “Affectivity is both the impression’s mode of givenness and its impressional content. It is the transcendental in a radical and autonomous sense” (Ibid.). For Husserl, the autonomy of the transcendental is recognized in the noetic capacity to freely vary the experienced thing (a freedom exercised most completely in the eidetic reduction). As Henry insists however (and we’ve already recognized) this freedom is ultimately constrained by “…a more profound necessity that is rooted in the subjectivity to which the reduction returns…a lawfulness that is immanent to hyletic contents…This lawfulness is nothing other than the lawfulness of their givenness” (20).
For Henry, this points us back to what he, developing Husserl’s own insights, characterizes as “Archi-givenness,” which Husserl locates in the constitution of temporality. The key text here is Lectures on the Internal Consciousness of Time, written under Husserl’s direction largely by Heidegger. Though it is the most profound of Husserl’s attempts to specify the givenness of the given, it is also the final deathblow for the hyle in Husserl’s phenomenology, or as Henry puts it, “the philosophical death of life” (read passage p. 21).
Read through the two paragraphs on (22-3).
In the following pages, Henry reads the Lectures highlighting those junctures at which Husserl’s analysis, at the very brink of a radical phenomenology in Henry’s sense, shrinks back from the essential in the analysis of the impressional essence of consciousness. The key is Husserl’s analysis of temporality as oriented by the ‘now’ that he identifies as ‘originary consciousness,’ rather than originary impression. By contrast, Henry insists, “Inasmuch as reality resides in the self-experiencing of subjectivity and life, in the auto-impression of the impression, then it is only in the auto-impression and its own givenness that the reality of the impression and life can be given to me. Pain itself teaches me about pain and not some kind of intentional consciousness that would aim at its presence, its being there now” (25). The experience in the now is thus a secondary givenness, predicated on the originary impressional givenness.
The aim of material phenomenology is to thematize the pure givenness of the given. Read last ¶ on p. 42.