Phenomenological Life - The Truth of Life

The Truth of Life

Michel Henry explains in C’est Moi la Vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme (I am the Truth. Towards a Philosophy of Christianity) what Christianity considers to be the Truth and which he calls "the Truth of Life". He shows that the Christian concept of Truth is opposed to what men habitually consider to be the truth, which originates in Greek thought and which he calls "the truth of the world". But what is truth? Truth is what shows itself and thus demonstrates its reality in its effective manifestation in us or in the world.

The truth of the world designates an external and objective truth, a truth in which everything appears to our gaze in the form of a visible object at a distance from us, i.e. in the form of a representation which is distinct from what it shows: when we look at an apple, it is not the apple in itself that we see but a mere image of the apple that appears in our sensibility and which changes depending on the lighting or the angle from which we view it. In the same way, when we look at a person's face, it is not the person in herself that we see, but only an image of her face, her visible appearance in the world. According to this way of conceiving truth, life is nothing more than a set of objective properties characterised (for example) by the need to feed oneself or one's aptitude for reproduction.