L’idée de Michel Henri sur un Cogito chrétien

Michel Henry’s reversed phenomenology, insistent on the primacy of transcendental immanence and the original appearing of Life as affectively experienced, received a further development with the grafting of Christian revelation onto the philosophical investigations of his earlier works. The result was an important change in the content of key philosophical concepts. In this essay, we try to examine how the specifical Cartesian notion of cogito receives an important alteration in the context of Henry’s philosophy of Christianity and phenomenology of the flesh. The thinking Ego and the question of indubitability acquires another and considerably richer ontological significance when conceived in the context of Henry’s conjugation of transcendental immanence with the non-ecstatic and pathetic character of Absolute Life’s self-donating and kenotic action, a reality already suggested in the Apostolic Writings and in the Church Fathers.