Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 71 (2010)

AUTHENTICITY - THE VIEW FROM WITHIN

RUUD WELTEN

In this contribution I wish to attempt a radical phenomenological elucidation

of the notion of authenticity. In order to elaborate on the highly problematic
philosophical idea of authenticity, I will make use of the philosophy of the
French philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002). Although Henry does not
make use of the term as such, it is his understanding of the Self as self-
affection that makes a real philosophy of authenticity not only possible, but
also inevitable. Following this line of thought, I will maintain that Michel
Henry’s philosophy is a philosophy of authenticity. Since there is, as we shall
see, the original experience of the Self, an original experience of life as self-
affection, this primal experience appeals us not to renounce our origin. The
authentic sphere as described in Henry’s works is called Life. I will discuss
first Henry’s phenomenology as a radicalisation of classical phenomenology,
in which the appeal for authenticity is explicit. Then I will focus on Henry’s
idea of the notion of the Self and how this notion escapes the problem of ever-
lasting self-reference. In the last paragraph I will focus on a possible Henrian
comprehension of the authentic life. I will also question the role of Christian-
ity in his later works. Is the Christian life the authentic Life? And if so, what
does that imply?

1. Authenticity as a Phenomenological Appeal

The notion of authenticity is most currently used as an ethical claim. Authen-

ticity is the aspiration not to loose oneself. Quite vague, it has something to do
with practical life and the consistency between practical life and its original
motivation that only can be found in the Self. It is not strange that the term
authenticity is nowadays often used in the context of daily life, not only in
applied ethics, but also even in management literature. Our modern society is
complex and as persons we have to play different, often conflicting roles.
Although origins of the dedication of life to be as authentic as possible can be
found already in Socrates as the thinker of Self-knowledge or Seneca as
thinker of the Self, the term authenticity as such occurs only recently and even
still rarely in philosophical literature. As Charles Taylor writes in The Ethics
of Authenticity: “The ethics of authenticity is something relatively new and
 Authenticity - The View From Within 2

peculiar to modern culture”.1 In the history of philosophy, the claim for

authenticity came into sight in a phenomenological light. As the last of the
Mohicans of modernism, Sartrian existentialism tried to describe a fair notion
of authenticity but it succeeded only in showing the inauthentic condition of
humanity. According to Sartre, we are doomed to be inauthentic while the
demand for authenticity remains. Authenticity is the assignment of our life,
but in the end, our existence turns out to be a tragical échec.
Postmodernism skips the promise of authenticity. The prevailing opinion of
post-modern philosophy today is that authenticity is nothing but a myth of
romanticism. There is simply no such a thing as authenticity. Even philoso-
phers who use the term in a positive sense, such as Taylor, hold that authentic-
ity is only possible against a certain horizon. We are not authentic on the basis
of our ‘Self’, but primal in relation to others, our tradition and social envi-
ronment. Authenticity, then, cannot be described as the original condition of
our life; at the most it will give a moral foretaste of our good behaviour to-
wards others. The appeal of authenticity consist in not to loose ourselves in
the plurality of the society and world we live in.
Although the contents of such an argument makes sense in a sociological or
psychological, even moral way, it is nothing but a paradox from a philosophi-
cal point of view. If it is possible to speak of authenticity in a meaningful way,
there must be a ground for authenticity that starts from within, not from the
outer sphere of the Self.
From a phenomenological viewpoint, authenticity is not so much a claim of
practical philosophy but the phenomenological stance to ‘go back to the
things themselves’. It was in phenomenology that authenticity became a ma-
ture philosophical concept. The assumption of originality in phenomenology
is often, both by Husserl and Heidegger, described as Eigentlichkeit, the Ger-
man word for authenticity. Adorno, for whom authenticity inevitable leads to
conservatism, because of its stance of ‘going back to the origin’, ridiculed
Heidegger’s philosophy as a ‘jargon of authenticity’2. The German ‘Eigen’
means, as it does in Dutch, my own language, ‘Self’. It implies the focus on
what belongs to the Self. The German term stands for also for ‘properness’,
‘trueness’ or ‘genuiness’. The assumption of genuiness or origin(ality) is nec-
essary for every meaningful discourse on authenticity. It introduces a dialec-
tics of phenomena that are less genuine than others. It implies that it does not
remain indifferent how we live our lives. Authenticity implies the promise of
a true life, in which the core is found in the Self. The problem that remains
consists in founding the reference for realizing this truth.

1 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 25.

2 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will, London, Rout-

ledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

Ruud Welten 3

To Husserl, Eigentlichkeit refers to the phenomenal content of direct experi-

ence. It is not so much a term used for persons, but for phenomena. To Hei-
degger, authenticity remains a mediated term. Via the inauthenticity of its
being-in-the-world, such as its ‘fallenness’, Dasein is compelled to search for
the authentic. In the ‘theyness’ of the Dasein, the ‘talk’ and ‘Neugier’, we can
notice that we are inauthentic. Being inauthentic at first, we can strive towards
authenticity. It belongs to authenticity that we only start to think about it when
we have lost it. To put it in Derridian terms, inauthenticity is the ‘original
supplement’ of authenticity. Yet, one cannot deny that even the ‘dialectics’ of
Heideggerian inauthenticity and authenticity at least implies a demand for
authenticity.
To prepare for Henry’s viewpoint, I will follow Husserl’s line, not Heideg-
ger’s. Not only the famous Husserlian phenomenological reduction (the
bracketing of the natural attitude) starts from the assumption of a genuine,
intact sphere of experience, but also Husserl’s later thoughts on the relation-
ship between experience and judgment, in which experience stands for Ei-
gentlichkeit that forms the basis of general judgment. However, in Experience
and Judgment, it becomes clear this original experience can only be ap-
proached from the side of the judgment, the sphere we are already in, by
speaking and analysing.3 But at least we are able descend in the direction of
first person lived experience. Yet, as will become clear, from the viewpoint of
Henrian phenomenology, this project of ‘going back’ in the form of Rückfrage
(‘regressive inquiry’) starts too late. Radical phenomenology does not start
from the outer sphere, but, as we shall see, in the inner. So, there must be a
way not to start with the secondary sphere of judgment (or language), but with
experience itself. In fact, and this is implied by Husserl too, we do that al-
ready in daily life, in the practice of our lives. Nobody who is speaking of
pain will maintain that pain is nothing but a concept or a judgment. Before it
becomes a judgment, pain is already there as an immediate sensation. The
same is true for joy, grief or many other experiences. For both Husserl and
Henry, experience is always subjective, or experience from a first person per-
spective. Judgment on the other hand, in this way of speaking, is always from
the third person perspective. But judgment must be historically grounded in
experience. This is in fact the core of the project of Husserl in Experience and
Judgment.
In order to understand Henry’s radicalisation of phenomenology, we must no-
tice that Husserl’s project consists in the disclosure of the origin of the possi-
bility of scientific judgements anyhow. So, predication is only possible on the
basis of prepredicative experience. Experience is the first layer of predication.
Husserl speaks about the second sphere as a ‘garb of ideas’ or as the ‘idealiza-

3 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, Evanston,

Northwestern University Press, 1973.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 4

tions of science’. And this is exactly what science is about: it inevitable tran-
scends the first person perspective. The scientist is focused on general judg-
ments, not on first person experiences. It is a well-known objection of Phi-
losophy of Mind towards phenomenology, namely, that since phenomenology
is based on subjective, first person experience, it will never be a real science.
The answer of phenomenology is clear: science can and must only be
grounded in the sphere of experience, not to remain forever in it, but to go
back to the foundations of scientific judgments themselves. Only phenome-
nology is strict science, because it is able to show the experiential foundations
of general judgments. As Husserl writes in his famous article on the origin of
geometry: “Science, and in particular geometry [...] must have had a historical
beginning; the meaning itself must have an origin in an accomplishment: first
as a project and then in successful execution”. 4 Husserl is not pointing at the
first geometers as psychological concrete people, but at the history in con-
sciousness that goes back to a point where experience is exceeded by predica-
tion. This point, as he analysed much earlier in his Philosophy of Arithmetic,
is a breakpoint between authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) and inauthenticity (Unei-
gentlichkeit). Inauthenticity here has nothing in common with a moral judg-
ment or the failure of a goal to be reached, but with the generalization beyond
concrete experience that enters with arithmetic. Put differently: there are
numbers that can be intuited while others can not. We are able to see that there
are three apples on the dish. We don’t really count them. And maybe we could
manage this up to, let’s say, a dozen. But how about the difference between 87
or 89 apples? We have to count and to make use of mathematical idealiza-
tions. The difference between the first, intuitive act and the second, is im-
mense and in fact the birth of phenomenology itself. The concept of number is
abstract but the numeral multiplicity refers to a psychological act of collecting
given in consciousness. Authentic here stands for ‘intuitive’, or ‘given by ex-
perience’, while inauthentic means generalized or symbolic. Hence, the
mathematization of experience begins. What matters for us now, is that
authenticity from a phenomenological viewpoint refers to a prepredicative,
intuitional giveness, while inauthentic refers to the ‘garb of idealizations’ or
‘veil of ideas’ (Ideenkleid 5). Authenticity here is very closely related to the
notion of Lebendige Gegenwart (Living presence) and also to embodied expe-
rience. The difference between the immediate feeling of my body, of becom-
ing tired or just enjoying the wind trough my hair by climbing a mountain on
the one hand, and the fact that 3000 meters is a tenfold of 300 meters and the

4 Edmund Husserl, ‘The Origin of Geometry’, appendix in The Crisis of European Sciences and Tran-

scendental Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 356.

5 Husserl, Crisis (o.c.), p. 48 (§ 9.h.).

Ruud Welten 5

fact that there is an increase of 4% on the other hand is immense. The latter is
nothing but a mathematisation of experience.
We could sketch the project of phenomenology as the acknowledgment of the
need to go back to the things themselves, which is, to intuition. So, authentic-
ity is a phenomenological appeal, even a demand. Phenomenology is not just
‘describing as good as possible’, it is motivated by the even moral necessity to
recover contact with reality. According to Husserl’s analyses in his Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in our culture we
have lost contact with the authentic, intuitive basis of our lives. Science has
become something that seems to survive without this sphere of our lives.
Given this background, Michel Henry does not so much criticizes but radical-
ises Husserl’s standpoint. He holds that Husserl didn’t go far enough to unveil
the real crisis in our culture. In La Barbarie, the book that is most clearly a
continuation and radicalisation of Husserl’s analysis of the modern European
mind, Henry presents a deep-rooted critique of Western culture.6 Henry is per-
fectly clear about the authentic value of humanity, which is nothing but Life
itself. I come back to this meaning of ‘Life’ later. Unlike Levinas, who is
critical about the idea of culture, for Henry, culture - in its authentic form - is
the Self-revelation of life and its Self-increasing.7 Because the contact with
real living experience is lost, humanity undergoes a serious breakdown.
Husserl ascribed already the fall into inauthenticity to the rise of Galilean sci-
ence, as indicated above. Henry follows and radicalises this critique. In a
long, central paragraph of the Crisis, Husserl shows how Galileo executes a
mathematisation of nature. For the first time, the idea of a ‘pure geometry’ is
erected and hence the universe is not something we live in, we feel or enjoy,
but something we measure. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me,” Henry quotes Pascal. This eternal silence does not refer to the
infinity of the sky, but to the absence of any feeling, experience and human
finitness in the world of mathematics. 8 Is this not exactly Pascal’s distinction
between the mathematical and the intuitive mind? Since the inauthenticity of
mathematization is described in terms of crisis, we cannot but feel some in-
convenience with Husserl’s Galileo. As interprets has shown, for Henry, the
most original consideration is not Husserl’s heroism of reason (to unveil the
foundational layers of logos as logic) but of Life as the original logos which is
a pathos. 9 This heroism of reason is striking in all Husserl’s later works con-

6 James G. Hart, ‘A phenomenologal theory and critique of culture: A reading of Michel Henry’s La

Barbarie’, in Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999) 255-279, devoted to Michel Henry.

7 Michel Henry, La Barbarie, Paris, Quadrige/PUF (Edition of 2001), p. 3.

8 Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 147.

9 Hart (o.c.), p. 255.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 6

cerning the nature of logic. The inquiries of Experience and Judgment, The
Crisis and of Formal and Transcendental Logic are concerned with the prob-
lem of origin. Yet, for Husserl this origin stands at the beginning of a logical,
predicative process that underlies the very possibility of science. This is not
Henry’s concern at all. Although, as we have seen, the origin is much the
same in Husserl and Henry (namely the first person experience) the goal to be
saved, the kernel of humanity is not logic, but Life. And Life (with the capital)
is nothing but the manifestation of this first person experience. Manifestation
towards what? Towards itself. Already in The Essence of Manifestation it be-
comes clear what Life is: “...that which experiences that it is, and in the
sweetness of its own arrival at self feels itself, trembles in itself in the interior
trembling of its own revelation to itself, this is life. What life is in its ultimate
possibility, and in its concrete Being-now becomes transparent. Every life is
essentially affective. Affectivity is the essence of life.”10
Henry is not focused on the layers of consciousness as such, but on the ulti-
mate phenomenological possibility of manifestation anyhow. Matter is blind.
Appearing belongs to appearing it Self, not to the things. In fact, it is the ar-
gument that Nicolas Malebranche described three centuries ago: the tree is not
able to appear from itself, first there is appearance anyhow. As Henry puts it:
“In this givenness of the wall, there is the fact that the wall is different from
its givenness. Its self, [...] is that of a thing or a being. But a thing by itself has
no ‘self’.” 11 For Henry, the real question of phenomenology does not concern
the appearing of the tree, but is simply ‘how does appearance appear to it-
self?’ Phenomenology is about ‘this appearing as such’. 12 Husserlian phe-
nomenology holds that appearing is always the appearing of something. Of
course, Henry would never deny this, but he points at the oblivion of the most
fundamental phenomenological question. The problem with Husserlian phe-
nomenology is that it reduces appearing to ‘the appearing of’. The Husserlian
‘Selbstgegebenheit’ thus has a radical, deeper, meaning: the phenomenologi-
cal ‘Self’ is not the thing that ‘gives itself’ but the self-appearing of
appearing.13 This appearing of appearing to itself is what Henry calls Life.
Life appears to itself, Life is this incessantly appearing to itself and nothing
else than that. Life is nothing but the self-manifestation of itself. From the
viewpoint of science this sentence is a tautology. If we understand it from the
inner perspective, it reveals that Life is a non-reflexive live experience that

10 Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation, Paris, PUF, 1963, pp. 595-596.

11 Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology (Phénoménologie matérielle, Paris, PUF, 1990, translated

by Scott Davidson), New York, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 52.

12 Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 36.

13 Henry, Material Phenomenology (o.c.), p. 52

Ruud Welten 7

cannot be described in terms other than itself. Henry tries to deepen both
Husserl’s life-world and his idea of the living present. But the big difference
between Husserl’s life-world and Henry’s Life is that the first is tied to inten-
tionality, while Life is fully non-intentional.
What does this mean? What is ‘non-intentionality’? In order to understand
that, we have to elucidate what intentionality is. As Husserl argues, the ‘things
themselves’ can only be approached from their experiences. To be conscious
means to be ‘directed toward’. Husserl calls this peculiarity of consciousness
intentionality. “Under intentionality we understand the own peculiarity of
mental processes ‘to be conscious of something’”.14 It is this reduction of con-
sciousness as a mere being directed toward that deprives consciousness itself
from its root. Because the question of appearance will be immediately an-
swered by the object of appearance. If I ask: ‘what is seeing?’ and the answer
is ‘Seeing is seeing things like trees or other people’, the answer says nothing
about the that of appearing but only the what of appearing. That Life is non-
intentional means that it does not concern the essence of the things that ap-
pear, but concerns appearance itself. Life, then, is appearance to itself, or Self-
appearance. That Henry elaborates an entirely non-intentional phenomenol-
ogy implies immediately a critical distance toward intentional, Husserlian
phenomenology.15 In this respect, we enter with Henry a phenomenology that
reverses the classical, intentional phenomenology: “The object of phenome-
nology in a philosophical meaning is never constituted by phenomena in the
ordinary sense of the word, but it is their phenomenality, or more precise, it is
the original way according to which this pure phenomenality itself
phenomenolizes.”16 This means that the real phenomenon is not the ‘thing’
outside, nor its phenomenality, but the condition for its phenomenality, that is,
as Henry says, ‘the object in its how’. For Henry, the expression ‘pure phe-
nomenology’ means the phenomenology of the appearing of phenomena, and
not just of phenomena. Henry thus reproaches Husserlian phenomenology that
it is build upon indefinite presuppositions.17 The condition of the appearing of
phenomena remains indefinite. It is this condition that is the only possible
object of Husserl’s phrase back to the things itself! Appearing cannot be re-
duced to that what appears. Hence, if we want to reformulate the sense of

14 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philoso-

phy, First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (translated by Fred Kersten), Dordrecht/
Boston/London, Kluwer, 1982, p. 200.

15 Michel Henry, ‘Phénoménologie non intentionelle: une tâche de la phénoménolgie à venir’, in Phé-

noménologie de la vie, Tome I: De la phénoménologie, Paris, PUF, 2003, p. 105.

16 Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology (o.c), p. 16.

17 Henry, Incarnation (o.c.), p. 39.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 8

authenticity within the scope of this radicalised phenomenology, we have to

search its meaning in this primal sphere of self-manifestation. 18
This line of thought is elaborated in Henry’s philosophy, which is not merely
a complaint against the alienation in our culture, but the stress on the phe-
nomenological priority of the first-person immediate experience of life, above
culture that looses itself in mere appearance. This ‘barbarism’ is only possible
because our culture forgets the beating heart of itself, namely Life.
This is also why Henry is not writing a mere ‘modern’ philosophy of aliena-
tion: is not the problem of the notion of alienation that it focuses on the sec-
ondary sphere of manifestation, namely a alienated world, that it does not
know from what exactly it is alienated? For this reason, Henry, does not give
that much attention to the notion of alienation in his monumental study on
Marx, but much more to the important notion of living labor. Living labour is
nothing else than the subjective immediate experience of the workingman,
called by Marx the labourer, which becomes manifest in the bodily experi-
ences of labour.19 Economy, being the mathematisation of living work, is far
from this sphere and therefore the basis of every form of alienation. Yet, when
we directly focus on economy, we are already out of the invisible experience
of the labourer. From this viewpoint, authenticity is on the side of the living
experience of labour, not on the side of economic value.
Economisation, but also mere rationalisation, then, implies death. Even in his
most political work Du communisme au capitalisme, Henry shows us that the
failure of both communism (far from Marx’ intentions) and capitalism must
be understood as figures of death, because both systems deny the subjectivity
of Life. 20 And death is exactly the negation of life. Life starts and finishes
with subjectivity, which means that it only based on Self-experience (se sentir
soi même). For Henry, Life must be - or better is already but we incessantly
forget that - the basis of our culture and our practical life. Phenomenology
brings us beyond this forgetfulness of Life.

2. The Self

18 This is what we can call the radicalization of phenomenology (‘Radical’ stems from radix, which

stands for origin, or, as it is often named by the later Henry arche).

19 Henry lays stress on Marx’ use of notion in the Grundrisse such as ‘Inorganic subjectivity’, ‘living

body’, living work’, ‘power of work’, ‘subjective work’. Michel Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme.
Théorie d’une catasprophe, Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob, 1990, p. 31. Cf. my ‘From Marx to Christianity,
and back. Michel Henry’s philosophy of reality’, in Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and
Theology 66 (2005) 415-431.

20 Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme (o.c.), p. 23.

 9

In our account so far, we have pointed at the location of authenticity. But it

has yet to become clear what exactly the role of the Self consists of. Who or
what is the Self? Does Life have a Self and if so, what does that mean? What-
ever definition we propose of ‘authenticity’, the word itself is derived from
the Greek ‘autos’ (
 Authenticity - The View From Within 10

cal pole? Of course, the Self is always in relation with the other in the world,
but does this automatically imply that it must be reduced to outer terms? If the
concept of the Self is not well elaborated, the concept of authenticity under-
cuts itself remains is undermined.
The problem of authenticity in general, the vagueness of the notion and the
danger of making it a mere moral judgment is the self-reference of the term.
Let us first focus on this problematic threat. Self-reference means that the
content, such as moral content or volitional content, cannot be found outside
itself. Searching for the real sense of authenticity, we will find no criteria out-
side. We cannot tell from the outside whether someone is authentic or not. We
can guess, but this can only to a superficial notion of authenticity. Authentic-
ity is not an object that can be determined by some symptoms. If we ask our-
selves whether we are authentic or not, we simple have no other criteria than
ourselves. We roam around in our consciousness, hoping to find a clue, but
every clue can only formulated by our self. His or her behaviour, by which I
mean this outer sphere, is only authentic in relation to its inner nature. Of
course, here we encounter a philosophical problem, because what exactly is
this ‘inner nature’? To put it in a phenomenological way: authenticity cannot
be an object that we measure with other objects.
For Henry, the Self (which we shall for the sake of clearness write with a
capital) is not a philosophical idea or a notion that only makes sense within a
dialectics of ‘the Self’ and ‘the Other’. To say it in terms of contemporary
philosophy, the Self is exactly the contents of the first person perspective. In
this respect, it is close to Taylor’s ‘sentiment de l’existence’. But what for
Taylor immediately implies a poor notion, is for Henry affluent, because of
the living content of it. Pain, for instance, is only comprehensible as the pres-
ence of something that affects me. Of course, I know that the other is able to
feel pain as well, but his pain is from my perspective nothing but a phenome-
non in the world. I can see or know that he feels pain. Yet, the feeling of pain
is inalienable mine. I can name or analyse it, but the pain itself is nothing but
pain. From a phenomenological point a view, it remains without any sense to
reduce pain to a thing, or better, to an object. Pain is subjectivity and subjec-
tivity is the phenomenological truth of my life. What does this mean? It inevi-
tably means that Life itself, in our example, is nothing but experience of pain.
But at the same time, the manifestation of pain is nothing but the manifesta-
tion of Life. The doctor knows what pain is, but not from my experience. This
implies that there is an unbridgeable difference between the notion or concept
of experience (which is always the third person perspective) and experience
as experience itself. In our modern world, we’ve forgotten not only this dif-
ference, but we have reduced the latter to the first. A new ‘veil of ideas’, a
sphere of calculations, theories and concepts lays as a cover over our experi-
ence. The point is not that we live in a world of mere conceptualisation, but
Ruud Welten 11

that conceptualisation has taken over the status of reality. We have to keep in
mind that the sphere we have called above the Self is inalienable to ourselves
(this is why we call it our self!). To Henry, there are not two worlds, one
original and the other alienated, as if we could choose between one of them.
Life is always there.23 It is found in the Self. So, subjectivity, is affectivity,
which means: to be able to undergo, to experience. Pain is not the pain of the
subject, but the very essence of its manifestation.24
So, the Self refers to self-experience, often named by Henry ‘épreuve-de-soi’,
which is closely related to ‘experience-of-one-self’ but also ‘undergoing-
oneself’. Here we easily recognize the theory of the Self as the manifestation
of Jemeinigkeit or mineness. Mineness is the ‘fact that experiences are charac-
terized by a first-personal givenness that immediately reveals them as one’s
own.25 In fact, this is what Henry calls ipseity.26 For Henry, it is crucial that
the experience of itself is not an experience that ‘informs’ the Self, as if the
Self is something of a brain or computer or a psychological entity, but it is
nothing but the absolute manifestation of itself. Here we meet with a radical
phenomenological notion of the Self: the Self does not refer to an identity, but
it is the matter of experience. From what we have said in the paragraph above
follows that there is simply no experience that is not my experience. Experi-
ence is always here, now and mine. The Self is not a thing as a psychological
ego, or a monadic function of consciousness. Self is the term in which appear-
ance refers to itself. This is also true for philosophical problematic terms as
‘the ‘soul’27 or for the evangelic notion of ‘the heart’ (‘coeur’). Henry under-
stands the evangelic term as ‘the essential affective human reality’.28
That the Self is self-referential means foremost that it cannot be understood
by the theory of intentionality. The Self is neither a subject that is in need of
an object, nor is the Self an initiator of consciousness or an helmsman. This
conclusion, with which Henry would agree, has a remarkable history that
banned the notion out of philosophy in order to found a shelter in psychology.

23 Henry, La Barbarie (o.c.), p. 5.

24 Cf. Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (o.c.), p. 595.

25 Definition by Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood. Investigating the First-Person Perspective,

London/Cambridge Mass., The MIT Press, 2008, p. 124.

26 Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (o.c.), § 52, p. 573.

27 Cf. Michel Henry, ‘The Soul According to Descartes’ (translated by Stephen Voss), in Essays on the

Philsophy and Science of René Descartes (ed. Stephen Voss), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.
40-51, and ‘Le concept d’âme a-t-il un sens?’, in Michel Henry, Phénoménologie, Tome I (o.c.), pp. 9-38.

28 Michel Henry, Paroles du christ, Paris, Seuil, 2002, p. 19.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 12

It was the idea of intentionality that inspired Sartre to think that consciousness
on the basis of itself was impossible. In order to be conscious of a thing, con-
sciousness itself must be empty. In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre
maintains not only that there is no such a thing as an individual Self, but also
that even the existence of such a Self would destroy the very possibility of
any consciousness. Because, as Sartre says, how could one be conscious of
something if consciousness would be something in itself? Still, for Sartre this
does not imply that inwardness or interiority does not exists, but that its con-
tents are nothing else than the outer: “Consciousness knows itself only as ab-
solute inwardness. We shall call such a consciousness: consciousness in the
first degree, or unreflected consciousness.” 29 Consciousness ‘in the first de-
gree’ is consciousness that is only a consciousness of something, a conscious-
ness that forgets itself. It even belongs to consciousness that it forgets itself.
Seventy years after Sartre’s analysis, certain proponents within the current
Philosophy of Mind hold a very similar thesis. Thomas Metzinger for in-
stance, author of Being no One, calls this forgetfulness of consciousness itself
transparency. “Transparency is a special form of darkness. In particular, phe-
nomenal transparency means that something particular is not accessible for
subject experience, namely the representational nature of the contents of con-
scious experience.”30 It simply means that we constantly look through con-
sciousness. “We don’t see the window, but only the bird flying by” [...] “The
instruments of representation themselves cannot be represented as such any-
more, and hence the experience system is, by necessity, entangled in a naive
realism.”31 What appears, is not consciousness itself, but the objects that are
its contents. For Metzinger, as it did for Sartre, this theory leads to the conclu-
sion that individuality as a positive Self is not constitutive for consciousness.
Of course, we can talk about our selves, but this ‘Self’ is not the actor of this
talking, but only an object among other objects. The Self, then, is, as Sartre
maintains, a thing. The Self as such does not exist. Also Metzinger raptly con-
cludes that there exists no such things as selves in the world. “For all scien-
tific and philosophical purposes, the notion of a Self - as a theoretical entity -
can be safely eliminated. What we have been calling “the” Self in past is not a
substance, an unchangeable essence or a thing (i.e., an “individual” in the
sense of philosophical metaphysics), but a very special kind of representa-
tional content: The content of a self-model that cannot be recognized as a

29 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirk-

patrick), New York, Hill and Wang, 1960, p. 41.

30 Thomas Metzinger, Being no One. The self-model theory of subjectivity, London/Cambridge Mass.,

The MIT Press, 2003/4, p. 169.

31 Metzinger, Being no one (o.c.), p. 169.

Ruud Welten 13

model by the system using it.”32 Both Sartre and Metzinger in our times hold
that it is neither necessary nor rational to assume an existence of the Self.
They conclude from this that the Self is a representational construct. There is
simply no room for such a thing as the Self, because it would destroy the very
impossibility of consciousness. The Self as a positive entity is nothing but the
object of consciousness, not the subject.
It is important to notice that Michel Henry would agree with several of the
claims of these ‘no-self’-doctrines. Firstly he would agree with the statement
that the Self is transparent. Henry even will say that it is invisible. And we can
say with Henry and Metzinger, that transparency is a special form of dark-
ness. Secondly he would agree with this theory that the Self cannot be con-
ceived of as an ‘organism’ or an object anyhow. Thirdly, Henry would agree
with the ‘no-self-doctrines' that the psychological Self is not the ultimate
foundation of consciousness. I return to this argument later on, but it is al-
ready appropriate now to say that, for Henry, Life is not created by the Self.
But what is most important, is that Henry would sharply disagree with the
most fundamental conclusion of Sartre and Metzinger, namely that, because
of the fact that selves only appear as a model of object, they do not exist. Of
course: the Self is a thing (Sartre) or a model (Metzinger), but this notion of
the Self is already intentional. This notion wants to comprehend the Self as
something other than itself. Sartre and Metzinger presuppose a specific con-
cept of the Self that they correctly reject. But they ignore the special meaning
of what Metzinger rightly calls ‘transparency’. A Henrian critique would be
that Metzinger remains a spokesman of the typical Western ‘ontological mo-
nism’, namely, that there is just only one way of manifestation, which is
appearance.33 This ‘ontological monism’, Henry shows, becomes clear in the
phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. Following the Greek model of
phainomenon, they have structured phenomenology as a philosophy that
brings phenomena to light. Even Heidegger’s Aletheia, which means ‘uncon-
cealment’, implies disclosure according to terms of light. The Self does not
appear, yet it is manifest. Therefore, from the invisibility of the Self does not
follow that it does not exist. The Self reveals itself to itself. Henry incessantly
holds that classical notions of ‘subject’ or ‘soul’ must not be understood as
entities referring to an object or special organ, even not the brain, but as the
manifestation of the Self to itself. This manifestation is, as Metzinger says,
indeed ‘a special form of darkness’.
This definitely does not automatically imply that Henry is a metaphysician.
What does it mean that the Self does not exist? With the elimination of the
Self we will loose the specific treat of experience that it always my experi-

32 Ibidem, p. 3.

33 Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (o.c.), § 8-16.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 14

ence, this is the mineness, Jemeinigkeit or ipseity. As said earlier, nobody

would deny that a certain experience is an experience of oneself. Ipseity can-
not be understood as a mere object. For Henry, the Self refers firstly to the
mineness of experience, but above all, to the Self-referential structure of this
experience. To experience one-self does not mean that I experience a thing
that is called the Self, but that the experience appears, and that this appearing
is only possible in the first person perspective. “Self in self-givenness thus
signifies not only, [...] that the thing given is given to itself, is shown in itself,
in the nudity of its own reality, such as it appears and thus such as it is.” 34
Henry calls this simply ‘subjectivity’, but we have to be attentive, because
subjectivity has nothing in common with a dependency on the object, as in
Sartre. It is not the object that appears, but appearing itself. The ‘Self’ is not
an entity, but a referential term. So is subjectivity: “Under ‘subjectivity’ we
understand that which undergoes itself (s’éprouve soi-même). Not something
that is this property of undergoing one-self, but the fact itself of undergoing
one-self...” 35 The entire philosophical project of Michel Henry consists in the
description of the phenomenological possibility of a primal sphere, that can-
not be reduced only to outer terms. But Western philosophy didn’t really suc-
ceed in describing the inner phenomenology of the subject. Subjectivity was
always understood as being related to objects and not on the basis of itself.
Contrary to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘Oneself as Another’, to Henry, the Self
is a term in which there is no difference, no representation, no alienation or
distance. For instance, shame, as a sentiment, makes myself appear to myself.
And contrary to Sartre's analysis of shame, in shame I do not merely experi-
ence the gaze of the other, but more importantly the presence of myself to
myself. Henry understands shame not as shame for something or someone,
but as a sentiment that arises with myself.36 The error of classical phenome-
nology, says Henry, is that it fails to recognise that the presence of myself to
myself is necessary for every intentional relationship with the world. There-
fore, affection is not affection that is caused by phenomena; rather, affection
is, at its core, pure self-affection. Self-affection is a relation without externali-
sation. Affection cannot be understood in the same way as we would under-
stand outer affection, which is being affected by something else than itself.
When I feel the heat of the wall in the sun, the wall itself does nothing, it is
my affection which makes the heat manifest. So, according to Henry the no-
tion of the Self is immanent, in contrast with the transcendent notion of the

34 Michel Henry, ‘The Phenomenological Method’, in Material Phenomenology, translated by Scott

Davidson, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 52.

35 Michel Henry, ‘Philosophy et subjectivité’, in Phénoménologie de la vie, Tome II, De la subjectivité,

Paris, PUF, 2003, p. 25.

36 Henry, L’essence (o.c.), § 62

Ruud Welten 15

Self, such as the idea of ‘Oneself as Another’. This means above all that the
Self cannot be understand as a relation to something, even not to itself. Only
on the basis of this radical immanence something like transcendence - relation
to something outside itself - becomes possible. But the Self itself is not a rela-
tion, nor can it be described as a relation.
If the Self is immanent, so authenticity cannot be other than immanent.
Authenticity is non-relational. It is the status of being itself. Of course, the
authentic Self is in relation with the outer world, but the point is that it cannot
be reduced to it. For the relation between the Self and the outer, we might re-
serve the term integrity. Integrity means that the behaviour of the Self is in
concordance with its own motivations. Authenticity is reserved as an imma-
nent notion. What from a viewpoint of dialectical philosophy might look like
a tautology is in phenomenology the radical origin of Life itself. To under-
stand this, we have to go follow Henry further, towards his comprehension of
Life as God.
Firstly, it is important to admit that Henry would agree with Husserl, when the
latter says: “However carefully it may observe and analyse, however truly it
may be directed toward my pure psychical life, toward the pure inwardness of
my soul, bare reflection remains natural, psychological reflection...”. 37 But,
according to Henry, Husserl goes wrong when he holds that the phenomenol-
ogical reduction is able to overcome this psychologism. Even the ‘phenome-
nological attitude’, which is the result of the bracketing of the natural attitude
remains an active reflection and cannot give answer to the passive, affective
modus of the Self. As activity, the Self is a psychological entity, but this Self
is only possible because there is passive affectivity anyhow. So the Self has a
more radical origin.
What does it mean that the Self has a radical origin? As we have seen, it refers
to the phenomenological immanency of self-manifestation. But here, we have
two, although closely related, different notions of ‘Self’. Firstly, the Self is the
manifestation of myself (because it is always the first person perspective) to
myself. And secondly, and, as Henry shows this in his later works on the phe-
nomenology of Christianity, even more fundamentally, the ‘Self’ refers to the
self-manifestation of Life itself. Life affects itself. The Self here refers to the
self-affection of Life. This Self is Life, without the ‘psychological self’ re-
mains impossible. Thus, what appears in myself as self-appearing is not only
‘myself’, but Life. Simply said: I experience that I am not my own creator,
but that I am already taken into a larger whole, which is not the world, but
Life itself. Authenticity refers therefore not firstly to my relation with the
world (which we called integrity) but to me ‘being a part’ of Life. In I am the
Truth, this is called Sonship. This is, says Henry, the real content of Christian-

37 Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie II, edited by Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana, vol. 8, The Hague,

Martinus Nijhoff, 1959, p. 79.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 16

ity. “The central affirmation of Christianity regarding to man is that he is the

son of God.”38 In contrast to, over and against Heidegger’s being-in-the
world, Henry proposes that man is first of all born in Life itself. This is ex-
actly what we described above: Life is the incessantly manifestation of itself
towards itself, it is the appearing of appearing itself. As long as we are in the
world, we are absorbed and fascinated in the appearance of thing, objects and
the like. We loose ourselves in the world. This means that we do not recognize
anymore that we are born in Life and that Life itself is our origin. Not our his-
torical origin, as if God created us and we now have to be responsible for our
own life, but our phenomenological origin: the appearance of appearance,
which is Life.
To make this clear, Henry distinguishes between a strong and weak concept of
self-affection.39 According to the strong concept, the content of the affection
refers only to itself. For instance, the content of grief or joy is nothing but
‘grief’ or ‘joy’. This is immanent, which means that it cannot be reduced to
‘grief for....’ or ‘joy of...’. Henry says that Life engenders the content of its
affection. ‘This content that is itself’. 40 Life creates nothing, it only affects
itself. The content of Life is uncreated. This is what Henry calls the ‘absolute
phenomenological Life’, which is in the language of the New Testament noth-
ing but God. In this respect, there is only Life, and death even doesn’t exist. I
am only able to die in the world. Only the ‘psychological self’ is able to die,
but Life itself never dies. It is, as Christianity says, eternal. This implies that
the eternal Life is not a life after my death. It only makes sense to speak of
death in the context of the weak self-affection. This is me, the ‘transcendental
ego’, the ‘first person perspective’. Here we see a phenomenological process
that is identical to that of Life. I am the affected one, the one that is affected
only by me, which is just another way of saying that pain is always my pain
and joy is always my joy. If it is not, than it is a concept in the third person
perspective. It is, as we would call it after what we have said above, inauthen-
tic. I am myself, but as Henry states, “but I myself have no part in this ‘being-
myself”. 41 Why not? Simply because the phenomenological process of self-
affection is not my creation, I am embedded in Life. In the language of Chris-
tianity: in God. This is why the New Testament speaks of Sonship. Let us no-
tice that this has nothing to do with a ‘belief’ in God or with a pious life.
Henry reads the New Testament as a phenomenological description of the

38 Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (translated by Susan Emanuel),

Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 94.

39 Henry, Im am the truth (o.c.), pp. 106-111.

40 Henry, Im am the truth (o.c.), p. 106.

41 Henry, Im am the truth (o.c.), p. 107.

Ruud Welten 17

self-affection of Life, as he did earlier with Marx. Yet, “the self-manifestation

that defines my essence is not my doing”. 42 I do not create my own Life, nor
did my parents. I am not born in the world; I am born in Life itself. 43 To be
aware of this is to know what Life is. The weak self-affection is proper to
man, while the strong self-affection is proper to God. But these are not two
separated phenomenological spheres (therefore Michel Henry’s philosophy
has nothing in common with the dualism of gnosis). Only the strong self-
affection makes the weak possible. In fact, already in The Essence of Manifes-
tation, Henry says that the ‘Self’ is beyond the ‘self as mere self-identity’.44
Here we see that the Self is a passive notion, marked by pathos: the undergo-
ing of its Life. This is in sharp contrast with Sartre’s idea of the being-
towards-itself (pour-soi) that is, active and producing, and incessantly respon-
sible for its own life. Only the weak self-affection is able to die, but Life itself
does not comes to an end when I die. Therefore, with Heidegger’s ‘being-
towards-death’ we remain always in the world, and shall never be able to un-
derstand what Life is in the sense of self-affection.

3. The Authentic Life

From a Henrian perspective, Life is always there and can’t be lost, but we can
loose contact with it. It is not hard to see that the philosophy of Henry bears
an attitude of indignation towards the world. We have lost ourselves into the
world and its visible affairs. Also in this respect, his philosophy is a radicali-
sation of Husserl’s criticism in the Crisis. The visible presence of the world
puts an unfounded claim on truth. Books as La barbarie but also later works
like I am the Truth pronounce a deep-rooted criticism towards this violence of
the visible. Like the Self as self-manifestation, authenticity is invisible. It is
transparent. Its criteria cannot be found outwardly, but only inwardly. Loos-
ing contact means to live in a world in which the visible truth rules over the
sensible Truth of the direct experience of Life itself. This implies that this
authenticity is not so much an ethical claim, but rather the demand to our-
selves to keep in touch with the life that we find in ourselves. As became
clear, the word authenticity does only makes sense when it is understood from
this immanency. The self-referentially of the Self does not necessarily imply
that it is an empty term. The ultimate reference of the Self is Life, and not the
world. If the Self were nothing more then a relation with itself, authenticity

42 Henry, Im am the truth (o.c.), p. 107.

43 Henry, Im am the truth (o.c.), pp. 152-169. And Michel Henry, ‘Phénoménologie de la naissance’, in

Phénoménologie de la vie, Tome I (o.c.), pp. 123-142

44 Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (o.c.), p. 591.

 Authenticity - The View From Within 18

would remain nothing but relation to itself. But since the Self is understood
beyond itself, authenticity cannot but have a content that refers to this sphere
that we have called Life, beyond the pure egomatic Self.
For Henry, the world is the sphere that is conceived of within the scope of
intentional phenomenology: the sphere of things or objects. It is visibility, the
‘fulfilment’ of intentionality itself. From this viewpoint, authenticity must not
be understood as an original ‘being-in-the-world’, but as an original being-in-
Life. And of course, we are always already in Life. It is true that this ethical
stance is religious, as long as ‘religion’ is not just a part of the world itself. It
has nothing in common with religion as a ‘conviction about life’ or belonging
to a certain social denomination with its own rules, formed by tradition.
Therefore the conclusion is not that the Christian life is the authentic Life, as
long as we do not really understand why Henry reads the New Testament in
its phenomenological structure. I hesitate to conclude overhasty that the
authentic life is the life in God, because then we loose the phenomenological
analyses of the immanency of the Self and Henry becomes a mere theologian.
Henry is neither a theologian nor a mystic. He neither writes a phenomenol-
ogy that is ‘typical’ for mysticism, nor does he describe a mystical ‘path’.
Henry makes use of theology only as far as it reveals a phenomenological
structure. Christianity comprises the insight of radical phenomenology. It con-
tains an arch-phenomenology. Henry’s phenomenology is radical in so far as
it concerns a quest for the roots of appearance itself, purified of hermeneutical
genesis and theoretical constructivism.
What, then, is the relationship between Christianity and authenticity? Christi-
anity here means two things: first the recognition of the primacy of the invisi-
ble. From the point of view of worldly, intentional phenomenology, the ap-
pearing of appearing remains invisible. Self-manifestation is precisely not
‘manifestation of something’. This is exactly what the term ‘revelation’ stands
for.
This will lead us to the second reason to make use of the term ‘Christianity:
Christianity as recognition of an inward turn. As long as we are intentionally
focused we see nothing but the world. Interiority remains hidden behind veils.
“Where is this ‘interior’ (intérieur) of which certain people speak?” says
Henry in The Essence of Manifestation. “We have searched all over for it and
we tend toward it, but we grasp nothing of the sort. The world is always there
and we find only exteriority and our openness to it.”45 We are like the student
of biology in La barbarie, diligently searching for the essence of Life in his
books, but forgetting that Life is already there, in the reading of the lines and

45 Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (o.c.), p. 487. I deliberately quote here from The Essence of

Manifestation in stead of I am the Truth. Henry’s appeal on Christianity has nothing to do with a certain
personal conversion towards Christianity.
Ruud Welten 19

in the turning of the pages. 46 The problem is not that Life is absent, but that
we forget it as the ultimate source of the meaning of our lives. This is why I
maintain that Life is the only and ultimate reference for authenticity. In fact,
the attention towards Life itself is the very mental movement of religion, and
spirituality in particular, itself. The inward turn intends to disclose the grounds
of subjectivity, beyond psychological subjectivity itself. Initially it was the
task of religion to bring us in contact with this Self that can only be found in
the practical and visible world. Many Christian texts, such as Augustine’s
Confessions, Meister Eckhart’s Sermons or John of the Cross’ Dark Night of
the Soul comprise detailed routes to the inward journey, which is the inward
journey to Life.47 They want to explore inwardness by an inward turn in order
to unveil the ultimate source of our life. “Thou wanders within me more
deeply than I do to myself”, says Augustine. Meister Eckhart, one of Henry’s
most important examples, wrote: “He is found within”.48 These texts speak to
us of the way in which the individual self gets at the ultimate reality, which
they call God, by an inward journey. They teach that man is able to find his
true source by means of an inward turn and they offer us descriptions of the
stages of the inner ascent in detail. The inner self is a space where man with-
draws from the bustle of the world. One secludes oneself from the world, and
the intention towards it, is replaced by an intention ‘towards’ God. The direc-
tion of attention has changed. And yet, we are not that far from the initial phe-
nomenological stance as described in the first paragraph. From the inauthen-
ticity of not living our own life, which means: to live in a universe of concepts
and numbers, we converse inward, not towards the visible and countable
world, but to the hart of experience, which is Life itself.
Unlike introspection, but like phenomenology, the field of research of the in-
ward turn does not concern private thoughts, but accessible modes of appear-
ance. Although elaborated as a private introspection, Augustine’s Confessions
cannot be reduced merely to a private sphere, pertaining only to the inner of
the author. In the case of the Confessions, very much like in the Meditations

46 Henry, La Barbarie (o.c.), p. 24.

47 Cf. Ruud Welten, ‘The Night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry. A Phenomenological Interpre-

tation’, in Studies in Spirituality, 2004, Kampen, Uitgeverij Kok Pharos, pp. 213-233. (Frensh version: ‘De
Marx au christianisme et retour: la philosophie de la réalité de Michel Henry’, in: Jean-Marie Brohm &
Jean Leclercq (dir.), Michel Henry, L’âge d’homme, pp. 361-373)

48 Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate (hrgs. Josef Quint), (Zürich, Diogenes, 1979), p.

203 (Predigt 11). Translation by M. O’C Walshe, Meister Eckhart. Sermons & Treatises, Volume II, (Lon-
don, Element Books, 1979), Sermon 66, p. 146.
 Authenticity - The View From Within 20

of Descartes or the Dark Night of the Soul of John of the Cross, the author
wants to unveil a more essential inward turn. 49
Authenticity in a Henrian sense implies a radicalisation of the existentialist
notion of the term. Existence means now not so much ‘to be myself’ but the
miracle of ‘to experience myself’.50 To Henry, only Life itself is itself in an
absolute way. This means that Life in its absolute phenomenological meaning
is the only criterion for authenticity. Authenticity, then, is the recognition of
our sonship in Life. It is true: from this analysis of authenticity, we cannot
easily trace some practical hints for an ethics. But the rediscovery of the hu-
man condition as Sonship cannot be understood separated from an ‘ethics’.
“The Christian ethic aims to allow people to overcome the forgetting of their
condition as Son in order to rediscover (thanks to it) the absolute Life into
which they were born.” 51 Our deepest Self can only be found beyond the exis-
tence of our self-in-the-world. Only the absolute Life is authentic, and since
we are living, we are able to live an authentic life.

Ruud Welten is Assistent Professor Philosophy at Tilburg University and Lector Business Eth-
ics at Saxion University for Applied sciences. His main interests are phenomenology and ethics
from an existential viewpoint. His works include publications on Michel Henry, Emmanuel
Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Address: Faculty of Humanities, Dpt. Philosophy, PO Box 90153, NL-5000 LE Tilburg; E-
mail: r.b.j.m.welten@uvt.nl

49 Ruud Welten, ‘The night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry. A phenomenological interpreta-

tion’, in Studies in Spirituality 13 (2003) 214-233, Leuven, Peeters.

50 Also the so-called ‘Christian existentialism’ of Gabriel Marcel did not really succeed in disclose this

meaning, because faith remained a ‘believe in...’

51 Henry, I am the Truth (o.c.), p. 171.