laszlo tengelyiliving beings!”^66 From the outset, biology is characterized by an
immense reduction: Life, in the phenomenological sense of the word,
Life as a self-revealing instance, is, first, reduced to biological contents
and, then, to physical and chemical structures. Henry contrasts his
phenomenology of corporeal and affective self-manifestation with this
preposterous reduction. Thereby, he indicates for phenomenological
research a direction that is strictly opposed to scientific naturalism.
Assuredly, he distinguishes between science and scientism.^67 Not
sciences, but only scientists are committed to scientism (and not even
all of them): “Science has never accomplished any reduction, if not a
methodological one. Scientists preach officially the aforesaid reduction,
by making science say what it, in fact, does not say.”^68 Without
hesitation, Henry adds: “They are the murderers of life [.. .].”^69
The Eckhartian conception of a chain of generation encompassing
not only God, the Father, and the Son of God, but also man (or human
being in general) is not only taken up and carried on in C’est moi la
vérité, but it is also supplemented, in this work, by a new idea. I think
of the idea that life engenders selfhood. In C’est moi la vérité, this idea is
deduced from the relationship between Life and the living.
The process of self-engendering which, according to Henry, is
charac teristic of Life, cannot be interpreted as a creation. Not “crea-
tion,” but “birth,” is the term which is used by Henry in his analysis
of the Eckhartian idea of a chain of generation. In C’est moi la vérité,
we are told: “We are faced here with the abyss that separates birth
from creation.”^70 But the proper question Henry raises in this work is
related to the birth of man within the Eckhartian chain of generation.
What is the difference of man from God, the Father, and from the Son
of God?^71 This question brings with it the novelty characteristic of
Henry’s later philosophy of Christianity.
Not surprisingly, Henry understands the Son of God as “mediating”
- Ibid., 63.. Ibid., 63.
- Ibid., 326.. Ibid., 326.
- Ibid., 54.. Ibid., 54.
- Ibid.. Ibid.
- Ibid., 131.. Ibid., 131.
- Ibid., 132.. Ibid., 132.