I am reading and interesting article from the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and came across this section.  I like it because of Henry’s emphasis on life.  I have thought for awhile that Descartes error was not the binary of a thinking thing vs an extended thing but of a living thing vs a non-living thing.


"… ‘ontologically mood is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure’ claimed Heidegger (BaT, 136).4 These moods concern not only the things in the world with which one is involved, but also the fundamental relation with the world itself.

It is in the context of these phenomenal descriptions of ‘mood’ that Michel Henry takes up where Husserl and Heidegger left off, especially in regards to the affects of ‘world’, which effectively ‘covers over’ things in their obviousness. Henry follows Heidegger and Husserl in claiming that modern western thinking (and here we might add its concurrent ‘secularisms’) define man according to only one type of seeing, which concerns the ordinary appearing of things in their clarity. This form of seeing is reducible to the problem of manifestation, to what Henry (2007, 252) interprets as ‘the Greek phainomenon which reserves manifestation to the light of exteriority, [and thus] modernity proves incapable of grasping the invisible in its proper phenomenological positivity’. Although Henry employs the word ‘invisible’ here, his conception of ‘life’ in fact seeks to challenge the basic phenomenal distinctions between being in/of the world. And while Henry appropriates aspects of Heidegger’s interpretation of worldhood, Henry (2003, 46) claims Heidegger still mistakenly took for granted that ‘to show oneself’ means ‘to show oneself in the world’, namely, in the ek-static outside. This mistake once again reduces all truth to the oversight of ‘the world’ and its ‘horizon of visibility,’ thus stripping ‘life’ of its ‘power of revealing’ (41) because it is thereby subjected to the world and its forms of illumination.5 “  

Jason W. Alvis (2016) How to Overcome the World: Henry, Heidegger, and the Post-Secular, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 24:5, 663-684, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2016.1247906
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2016.1247906
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