Andrzej Gielarowski

The article addresses the problem, which has not yet been analyzed in the Polish philosophical and anthropological literature, and which deals with the subject of unknowability or invisibility of God in the contemporary French phenomenology of religion. The text focuses on the ideas of transcendence, immanence and mystery as developed and further elucidated by Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry and Gabriel Marcel. The author deduces from the philosophical discourse on the three concepts that the transcendence and immanence are the ideas which unilaterally carry out the tasks set for them by their authors, which is “to protect” God from objectification to which the phenomenological method leads when applied to the problem at stake, in particular, as it was presented by Edmund Husserl. Not only Lévinas and Henry were in opposition to this method but so was Marcel. who had used the concept of mystery for the same reason. According to the author of the article, neither the transcendence nor the immanence but the concept of mystery is the one which «protects» God the most efficiently against objectification. From the phenomenology of religion point of view the most important thing is that in Marcel’s thought God does not appear as a phenomenon, and yet that does not exclude the religious relationship between Man and God. According to Lévinas and Henry this biblically understood relation cannot exist even though their concepts also have relatively strong foundations in the Bible. Therefore, the author of the text believes that the Marcelian concept of mystery meets the expectations of a believer better than the Lévinasian concept of transcendence and the Henrian idea of immanence. The concept of God as the Mystery as developed by Gabriel Marcel allows man to enter into a religious relationship with God by the means of prayer.

Mysticism and life. Religious relationship in Michel Henry’s phenomenologyThis article discusses the concept of mysticism in the phenomenology of Michel Henry, which involves the relationship of life and the living, as set against two opposing views on the connection of life to the living: Arthur Schopenhauer’s naturalistic philosophy of life and the religious doctrine of Master Eckhart. In the first approach, life is identical with the will to live, a natural force inherent to everything that is alive. In the other one, life is identified with the Christian God, encompassing all individual livings and constituting the foundation for all creation existing out of him. Hermeneutic analyses carried out in the article consider those texts by Michel Henry which comment on the works of Master Eckhart and Schopenhauer and provide for his own interpretations of them. They aim to show that Henry’s thought involves the religious understanding of mysticism as pertaining to the connection of life and the living identified with the relationship of God and humans. Moreover, the mysticism of life should be distinguished from Schopenhauer’s naturalistic metaphysics of life, while its main inspiration are the Christian teachings of Master Eckhart, therefore the former may be considered as one of the interpretations of the latter. Irrespective of its Christian background, Henry’s thought can be also of interest to non‑Christians, as it presents a way of accessing life through the experience of a living body underlying self‑affectivity, largely forgotten in modern times but which can be revived by communing with art, because aesthetic experience is one of the forms of feeling one’s own being. In Henry’s thought, aesthetics, ethics and religion are closely interrelated, providing an effective remedy for the contemporary cultural crisis.