Michel Henry on the nature of human self -manifestation

Ordinarily, human self-consciousness is thought to arise only when a human subject becomes an object of intuition for himself through the mediation of ontic entities and/or the temporal horizon. Michel Henry, however, understands the human subject to be present for himself independently of the mediation both of beings and of the horizon. Henry's thesis seems to many critics to entail a solipsism that compromises both the relational and the rational character of human subjectivity. In this dissertation, however, I seek to show that Henry's thesis instead accounts for human relationality and rationality in terms of their transcendental conditions of possibility.;The introduction states the purpose and plan of the dissertation and gives an overview of the sources employed. Chapter 1 discusses Henry's effort to effect a surpassing of the "monistic-intuitionist understanding" of human self-consciousness that situates self-consciousness in the ontological relationship of opposition that obtains between transcendence and the temporal horizon. Chapter 2 shows why Henry understands the ontological relationship of opposition between transcendence and the horizon to be itself effectively possible only on the foundation of an essentially non-oppositional self-relation, i.e., "immanence." Chapter 3 explains how the two phenomenological structures of the immanence of transcendence and the horizon of transcendence are two phenomenological modes in which the singular subject manifests both himself and the lifeworld. Chapter 3 also argues for the plausibility of Henry's thesis in response to the critique of Dan Zahavi. Chapter 4 discusses Henry's ontological understanding of the human body, according to which the body is the effective possibility of the subject's relatedness both to the lifeworld and to his human Other. Chapter 5 discusses the manner in which works of art and philosophical texts work to signify for the incarnate subject his own irreducibly ontological character and the transcendental character of the lifeworld.