Does Christian Truth need justification ? Does pain ?

Does Christian Truth need justification ?

Does pain ?

One doesn’t realize one is in pain through observation or deduction, the truth of being in pain is the pain itself, there is no gap, it is imminent and immediate, self-authenticating.

Christ IS the word, He is One With His speech, could it be likewise ?

Michel Henry criticizes a theory of language that separates the act of saying from what is being said.

“….all philosophies of language agree on the basic relationship between the utterance (what is being said) and the referent (what is being talked about). Language always refers to something external to itself.”

Henry explores the possibility of a language in which this distance would not exist and that would therefore also exclude the possibility of lying and deception.

“The Truth of Christianity, instead, is a thoroughly phenomenological truth in that it does not make a distinction between manifestation and what is manifested.”

Christ’s words need no proof or validation because they are self-revelatory in that “what Christ says about himself is not a word about life which would still have to prove what it says, but it is Life itself—which reveals itself and speaks in his Word [Verbe] in such a way that, Word [Parole] and revelation of this absolute Life, it is the absolute Truth which bears witness to itself” .

They are a self-revelation that has no need of interpretation because it has no hermeneutic distance intervening between speaking and hearing. It is absolute Truth, the Truth in person.

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 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 of 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'  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”

Life’s language is not ‘worldly’ language, which is a language of saying and showing.

Every speech of God is a power that speaks itself and shows itself in the effective speaking of the Word (Verbe), but it differs radically from human speech that always refers to the world and to what it shows therein.

Hence Henry speaks of a “speech (parole) of finite life” and a “speech (parole) of infinite life,” according to a precise epistemological axiom: affect = speech (world and life) = the sentiment that is religion. The living being is thus he who speaks that originary Word (Parole), the referent having been brought to the side of life as a normative ethical instance. In this sense we can say without the least doubt that the power of speech (parole) is in its power of conversion, of “metanoia,” insofar as the speech is capable of trans-forming.

In this sense, the arrival of the truth is not announced according to exteriority or visibility, that is, according to the most universal Greek modalities of being-in-the-world (be it given, thrown, or open); rather it is announced on the plane of interiority.