Marx, and Nietzsche too, claimed religion was alienating to life.
So, what is life ?
I mean the raw, immediate, actually experience of living. No one has explored this more then Michel Henry, his material phenomenology is inspired by Marx’s return to life.
Life is affective, “the universal form of all experience in general and as the form of this form.”
Life is also self-appearing, by which he means that the subjective phenomenality (the one Descartes could not doubt) must self-reveal. For something to appear, and in order to avoid an infinite regress, there must be an ability to self-appear, and that is life. However, Henry does not identify life with biological systems.
Indeed, both Marx and Nietzsche are correct that religion CAN BE alienating. As long as religion is understood as merely devotional, it will alienate humanity from reality. However, Christianity also emphasizes reality, real Life. It is in this perspective that Marx speaks highly of Luther:
‘Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. [...] He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man.’
Here, the transformation of devotion, which always presupposes a phenomenological distance, to the spiritual domain of conviction, is crucial.
‘The recognition of the spiritual meaning of Lutheran thought leads us to the origins of dialectics, to a living experience’, says Henry.
This living experience is not a devotional experience, so it is not outside itself and needs no exteriority.
This allows us to understand religion as a way of experiencing ourselves, instead of experiencing externalisation and alienation.
Marx of course rejects Luther’s solution but praises his perceptivity on the transformation of devotion into conviction.
Christianity ought to be experience, not devotion or religion as mere representationalism. This is not a moral or hypothetical imperative, but precisely what ‘Christian experience’ means: a re-turn to life, understood as self-experience, without the alienation, without disassociation of the self.
It is a life of acting without ‘knowing’. As Henry already says in his monumental study of Marx, Christ is the metaphysical expression of experienced life itself:
“Christ is the metaphysical expression of experienced life itself: ‘The passion and the sacrifice of Christ reveal the metaphysical law of fundamental affectedness of Life itself.”
And so, Henry’s notion of Christ is defined by inner experiences that are understood phenomenologically instead of psychologically: ‘What Christ teaches is the purity of the heart, an internal and unlimited love. But what is love, that is not ‘realized’ and does not act?
So Christianity is truly a “Marxist" praxis in two senses of the word. First, there is no ideology that must be put into practice and second, life manifests itself in human performances.
Ultimately, Christianity is the performance of invisible life, which is consistent with the way Henry interprets the Marxist notion of praxis.
Henry reads the form of religion that Marx critiques as little more than a version of idealism that has misrepresented the truth of religious life. Henry writes that Marx's critique of religion is not as radical as it appears; in fact, when it states that religion has reduced consciousness to a 'conscience that has become exterior to itself, self-contradictory, and alienated and dispossessed of itself it would appear to supply his own arguments against a philosophy of representation.
Since such a conscience has become 'the principle creator of religious representations', and since Marx's most fundamental claim against religion is that 'man makes religion, it is not religion that makes man', it is the reduction of religion to such a disempowering conception of representation that Marx is truly critiquing according to Henry.
The basis of religion does not consist of ‘believing in something’, for instance ‘in God’. God is not an object of faith, God is not a mirror either, but God is the immanent vitality of Life itself - in the actual phenomena of lived religious experience in the flesh that is, Henry makes no comment on the ontology or existence of God. Henry says,
“What is religion? Re/igio, this means a bond - whether the etymology is true or false, this is not of any importance, it is a scheme of work. This bond is for me that of a living to life. It is the mysterious and interior bond which makes it so that there is no living without life - a life that is its own and more than its own. Ethics has as its aim for us to make this bond come alive, that is, to make it so that this forgotten bond is re-experienced.”
Henry’s path is toward a conception of “life” as self-manifestation or self- revelation through his elaboration of a material phenomenology for describing the individual's relation to his or her self. Henry calls this material relationship, one that he has tirelessly investigated and elaborated through such terms as praxis, auto- affection, and incarnation, a rejuvenated subjectivity that is life itself.
Life “critiques” – in the Kantian sense– religion by obliging it to discover its real essence.
Therefore contrary to the representation that places everything in the horizon of the world, making the world its truth, Life self-reveals itself.
Henry writes: “Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life.
Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. Where therefore does this Life find its essence? It finds its essence in that unique Truth that does not distinguish between what is true and what manifests, therefore merely in the only truth in which the revelation of the self takes place without becoming being nor object of the world.”
Henry argues that the tendency to regard Christianity as promoting such distinct material spaces as a 'beyond' and a 'down below' must veil its recognition of the fact that the individual must 'confront the world', 'not by illuminating an external and formal opposition to it', but coming into contact with it.
Christianity's concentration on the act or the good deed that realizes or fulfills the Commandment of love or the interiorisation of auto- affection, confronts the world 'by transforming it'.
This phenomenality, which he calls “life,” is in his view fundamental in the strong sense, in that it operates prior to the “phenomenality” known by the philosophical tradition, before any “world,” before ontology, and in the end, before phenomenology itself.
“Only if appearing appears first in itself and as such can something, whatever it may be, appear in turn, show itself to us. There can “be” things, real things imbued with real meaning, the world in all its wondrous diversity, only in life.
Pain, for example, reveals itself in pain and only in that way, and joy shows itself only in joy. What shows itself in it is what it is, its own content, “showing itself in the appearance it makes of itself, and exhausting itself in this appearance... in the positivity of its bare and irrefutable phenomenological being, which cannot be questioned in any way.”
Life shows itself only in and through life. Its phenomenological structure is the immediate as such, absolute immanence. Its phenomenological effectiveness is its own doing, and what it reveals is itself.
Henry’s path toward a conception of “life” as self-manifestation or self- revelation, says that, “the source of revelation, the power which produces it, is neither beyond revelation nor its effectiveness, but rather constitutes its effectiveness and hence reveals it.... Life testifies to itself, it itself gives testimony about what it is. The self-witnessing of life, the testimony which it makes concerning itself is its essence, its revelation.”
“Exteriority,” “transcendence,” “the outside,” each of these are for Henry names for the phenomenality of the world, where no revelation, no self, and no life can arise, because this mode of phenomenality reveals what it does always and only outside itself, indifferent to it, and independent of it
Not only can philosophy not determine the conditions of affectivity, it cannot add or subtract from such affectivity by conferring on it a “meaning.” Thus, for example, “no meaning given to the Being of suffering can change anything in its regard or in any way diminish the weight of its presence or parody its ‘truth.’
For Michel Henry, the world has no independent phenomenality outside life. Where would it appear?
In Henry’s view, this conception of the world begins with the “Galilean reduction” - the exclusion of specifically human qualities from its definition of the real, the exclusion of everything that depends upon human sensibility for its reality.
Starting from this premise, and from this definition of reality, one cannot construct “the human” after the fact, with that from which it has been excluded at the outset.
If the access to God is only through life, and if life shows itself only in affectivity, then the exclusion of this mode of revelation, the exclusion of the human, as such, can lead only to the disappearance of God, as such, and also to the unintelligibility of life’s revelation.
This path is possible, only because revelation constitutes in itself its effectiveness. “The givenness of phenomena is possible only under the condition of a givenness of givenness itself, a self-givenness. This self-givenness is life.”
Where the one deals with this relationship starting from life, the other considers this relationship starting from the living it engenders. Here the distinction between philosophy and theology is the distinction between two different approaches to the same question.
Henry distinguishes between worldly language and religious.
For Henry, the 'speech of the world is a speech which speaks of that which shows itself to us in this exteriority that is the world' . Henry argues that this kind of speech that relates to only one aspect of life, and that equates 'the appearance' with 'the condition of possibility of speech' is 'nothing other than what the Greeks called Logos' .
Henry asks whether the 'properties of this speech must not also depend on those of this appearance'. Henry's thesis argues that 'with Christianity arises the extraordinary intuition o f another Logos - a Logos which is also a revelation, no longer the visibility of the world, however, but the auto- revelation of Life'
It is with this revelation and with this understanding of a new kind of Logos that Henry discovers the second kind of language that is found in the New Testament and that, he believes, must be imparted to humanity.
This new language is the language of suffering. For Henry, 'suffering experiences itself, it is the reason, one must say, that only suffering enables us to know suffering' (94). Henry's discovery of such a language returns us once again to his unique conception of the body as flesh, a conception that he has reiterated time and again in his works on the phenomenology of the body and on material phenomenology.
Henry describes the 'speech of suffering’ as follows:
"It does not discourse on suffering, it does not make use of any word, any sign sound or writing, of any signification, it does not rely on any wholly unreal significations through the appropriate linguistic formations - verbs, conjunctions, etc. Because suffering speaks in its suffering and through it, because it only makes one thing with what it says, a single suffering flesh to which it is delivered without the power to escape or break itself apart, it is then in effect that the speech of suffering ignores duplicity; it is in itself, in the effectivity of its suffering, that it testifies to itself without recourse to any other testimony."
This manner of remaining within oneself is what, according to Henry, philosophy designates as immanence. But the immanence of which Henry speaks here is 'neither a signification nor a concept, comparable ta those used by the speech of humanity' .
Henry suggests that it is by coming into contact with such a language of suffering that Christ's 'Speech of Life' (113) can be realized and interiorized. He argues that Christ as Word is not something strange and foreign to us, but that, on the contrary, in the same way as 'suffering says nothing other than suffering, the reality of which the Word of Life speaks, is Life itself which is the auto-reve/ation, the objective reality”
As to Marx’s larger sociological critique of religious alienation, John Milbank sums up,
“As to the account of the economic processes themselves, what Marx purports to provide is an account of how, in this area also, human beings have been subject to ‘religious’ illusion. But in actual fact this illusion is only ‘exposed’ within the framework of a humanist/positivist metanarrative which itself reflects a variant of religious immanentism.
Marx’s critique of the ‘hieroglyph’ remains within the terms of antique materialism, which failed to perceive, as we saw earlier in the chapter, that every cultural reality is neces- sarily ‘hieroglyphic’ insofar as it deploys meanings which are always inde- terminate and therefore escape its total control.
Marx himself is actually close to recognizing this, because he knows that all specifically economic (as opposed to technological) categories fall within the realm of signs, and he knows, also, that the capitalist illusion is not an illusion in the sense of an appearance concealing an underlying reality (as commentators often wrongly suppose) but rather an illusion in the sense of a ‘dramatic fiction’ which human beings enact without recognizing its fictional character.
This is clearly the case, because capital only has power over labour to the degree that the ‘language of commodities’ is generally accepted, and labour itself is fetishized as generalized, quantifiable labour time. There is only power through illusion, and all that really gets concealed is the unreal, imaginary character of value, the commodity and fetishized labour.
However, Marx accepts too readily the notion of illusion, and fails to reflect that to be human, or to be a cultural being, is necessarily to inhabit a fiction. Merely to come to recognize the fictional character of capitalism need not lead one to denounce it as ‘illusion’, nor as the irrational seduction of humanity by its own signifying powers.
To take the three key instances of fetishization, alienation and reification: it is true, in relation to fetishization, that to make different commodities and kinds of labour ‘equivalent’ in terms of abstract quantifiability cannot be rationally justified; it is true, also, that not all cultures operate this mode of equivalence, which is uniquely well adapted for calculation and predictability. However, all cultures operate, in their social relationships, some principle of equivalence, of ‘equalizing the un- equal’ – this undergirds punishment and compensation as much as barter and gift-exchange – and none of these principles of equivalence can be rationally founded. In this sense, the capitalist ‘economy’ – or simultaneous disposition of forces and meanings-as-equivalences – is no more rational or irrational than any other economy.”
It is with this revelation and with this understanding of a new kind of Logos that Henry discovers the second kind of language that is found in the New Testament and that, he believes, must be imparted to humanity.
This new language is the language of suffering. For Henry, 'suffering experiences itself, it is the reason, one must say, that only suffering enables us to know suffering' (94). Henry's discovery of such a language returns us once again to his unique conception of the body as flesh, a conception that he has reiterated time and again in his works on the phenomenology of the body and on material phenomenology.
Henry describes the 'speech of suffering’ as follows:
"It does not discourse on suffering, it does not make use of any word, any sign sound or writing, of any signification, it does not rely on any wholly unreal significations through the appropriate linguistic formations - verbs, conjunctions, etc. Because suffering speaks in its suffering and through it, because it only makes one thing with what it says, a single suffering flesh to which it is delivered without the power to escape or break itself apart, it is then in effect that the speech of suffering ignores duplicity; it is in itself, in the effectivity of its suffering, that it testifies to itself without recourse to any other testimony."
This manner of remaining within oneself is what, according to Henry, philosophy designates as immanence. But the immanence of which Henry speaks here is 'neither a signification nor a concept, comparable ta those used by the speech of humanity' .
Henry suggests that it is by coming into contact with such a language of suffering that Christ's 'Speech of Life' (113) can be realized and interiorized. He argues that Christ as Word is not something strange and foreign to us, but that, on the contrary, in the same way as 'suffering says nothing other than suffering, the reality of which the Word of Life speaks, is Life itself which is the auto-reve/ation, the objective reality”
As to Marx’s larger sociological critique of religious alienation, John Milbank sums up,
“As to the account of the economic processes themselves, what Marx purports to provide is an account of how, in this area also, human beings have been subject to ‘religious’ illusion. But in actual fact this illusion is only ‘exposed’ within the framework of a humanist/positivist metanarrative which itself reflects a variant of religious immanentism.
Marx’s critique of the ‘hieroglyph’ remains within the terms of antique materialism, which failed to perceive, as we saw earlier in the chapter, that every cultural reality is neces- sarily ‘hieroglyphic’ insofar as it deploys meanings which are always inde- terminate and therefore escape its total control.
Marx himself is actually close to recognizing this, because he knows that all specifically economic (as opposed to technological) categories fall within the realm of signs, and he knows, also, that the capitalist illusion is not an illusion in the sense of an appearance concealing an underlying reality (as commentators often wrongly suppose) but rather an illusion in the sense of a ‘dramatic fiction’ which human beings enact without recognizing its fictional character.
This is clearly the case, because capital only has power over labour to the degree that the ‘language of commodities’ is generally accepted, and labour itself is fetishized as generalized, quantifiable labour time. There is only power through illusion, and all that really gets concealed is the unreal, imaginary character of value, the commodity and fetishized labour.
However, Marx accepts too readily the notion of illusion, and fails to reflect that to be human, or to be a cultural being, is necessarily to inhabit a fiction. Merely to come to recognize the fictional character of capitalism need not lead one to denounce it as ‘illusion’, nor as the irrational seduction of humanity by its own signifying powers.
To take the three key instances of fetishization, alienation and reification: it is true, in relation to fetishization, that to make different commodities and kinds of labour ‘equivalent’ in terms of abstract quantifiability cannot be rationally justified; it is true, also, that not all cultures operate this mode of equivalence, which is uniquely well adapted for calculation and predictability. However, all cultures operate, in their social relationships, some principle of equivalence, of ‘equalizing the un- equal’ – this undergirds punishment and compensation as much as barter and gift-exchange – and none of these principles of equivalence can be rationally founded. In this sense, the capitalist ‘economy’ – or simultaneous disposition of forces and meanings-as-equivalences – is no more rational or irrational than any other economy.”
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