ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Henry's argument that we cannot learn the truth from phenomenology, that phenomenology always comes too late as he puts it, to attain the essential truth. In Henry's work, phenomenology is supplemented by - and even surpassed by - a realized eschatology that discloses truth not at the end of a phenomenological process or after the work of reduction, but at the beginning, serving as the presupposition of all philosophic work. Unfortunately though, according to Henry's analysis, phenomenology has left this question which is crucial for it in the dark. This tendency of phenomenology to conceive of all appearance on the model of the appearance of things in the world to consciousness is what Henry calls 'ontological monism'. As long as philosophy remains prisoner to the idea of a transcendent horizon of human knowledge, the relationship of the ego to itself cannot be understood except as a particular case of a transcendental relationship of Being-in-the-world.
