Spirituality, Consciousness and the Emancipation of Life: Michel Henry’s Spiritualist and Catholic Interpretation of Karl Marx

Abstract

Michel Henry is quite a unique figure in the phenomenological movement, as well as in philosophy more generally. In his work, apparently contradictory and heterogeneous motifs were integrated – in my opinion – into a harmonious, organic and synthetic unity. We can find in his philosophy firstly four leading and orientating traditions that articulated the main framework of his thought: phenomenology, Catholicism, philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie), and the philosophy of Marx, the latter of which he sharply juxtaposed to the entire tradition of Marxism. In this regard, perhaps the two most important philosophical authors for him were Edmund Husserl and Karl Marx, the latter of which was considered by Henry to be the most crucial philosopher in the entire history of Western philosophy, and the most original and authentic phenomenologist (even in comparison to the founding father of the phenomenological movement, namely Husserl). Michel Henry believed that modern global society was in such a crisis from which only Marx’s philosophy could provide a way out, in a theoretical regard as well as in a normative, practical respect. Henry was of the opinion that without drastically overcoming capitalism, Western civilization – as well as humankind globally – would collapse in intellectual, spiritual and also physical regard. Barbarism, which was vigorously criticized by Henry as a fundamental and intrinsic feature of capitalism, reifies everything and renders things under the viewpoints of utility and profitability, including phenomena like subjectivity and consciousness. We must emancipate human and non-human, conscious and non-conscious, life by radically surpassing capitalism. With this gesture, we can reach a genuinely authentic society, which also relies on an emancipated form of consciousness and spirituality. In this paper, we attempt to show how Henry reformulates the Marxian idea of emancipation, based on the aforementioned four traditions.