ABSTRACT
In tracing the essence of the painting's mode of manifestation to the invisible tonalities of life, Michel Henry lays the foundation for explaining what unifies all works of art, despite their varied mediums. For Henry, the organizing principle of contemporary culture as a culture determined by the cult of scientific ideology is the negation of the individual's living subjectivity. He will contend that ontological monism distorts the true nature of subjectivity by concealing the fact that subjectivity manifests itself in a form of appearing whose mode of givenness is entirely different. Commenting on the great breakthrough that Edmund Husserl's philosophy marks, Henry states, Philosophy has tried to define what a man truly is. Henry will locate the heart of Husserl's error in the latter's account of the relation between temporality and self-experience. The malaise, observes Henry, has intensified since Husserl's own survey of the crisis in the late 1930s.
