His first significant published work was on The Essence of Manifestation, to which he devoted long years of necessary research in order to surmount the main deficiency of all intellectualist philosophy, the ignorance of life as experienced.
Being bullied or denied, returning its forces against itself,[24] or on the opposite deploying itself freely as in the art, in the love or in the work,[25][26] life through its multiple manifestations focalizes all the concerns of Michel Henry's thought.
So phenomenology reaches according to Michel Henry its limits, as the "texture" of phenomenality itself and its simple manifestation refers constantly to the inner reality and to the effectivity of life, which it requires as a condition of possibility.
This is the meaning of the title of the main work of Michel Henry, The essence of manifestation: the world appears behind a subject, who discovers this space of exteriority only because he is firstly in passive relation with himself, as being living.
[35] Some of his assertions seem paradoxical and difficult to understand at first glance, not only because they are taken out of context, but above all because our habits of thought make us reduce everything to its visible appearance in the world instead of trying to attain its invisible reality in life.
[45][46] All such faculties possess the fundamental characteristic of appearing and manifesting themselves in themselves, with no gap or distance; we do not perceive them from outside our being or as present to our gaze, but only in us: we coincide with each of these abilities.
For him, every “human being is potentially, and perhaps even necessarily, a painter and an artist”, because the possibility of painting is fundamentally written in him in reason of his inner life, of his feeling of oneself and of sensibility he carries in him, as he explains it in his book Seeing the invisible.
[106][107][108] In the same way, for the painter and art theoretician Wassily Kandinsky, the function of abstract painting is no longer to give us to see or to represent the external world or the objects it contains, as was the case with figurative painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is often without real interest on an esthetical or emotional point of view, but on the contrary, as with music, to express or more precisely to “show into the visible light” our inner life, our sensations, our passions and our emotions.
[115][116] And as Michel Henry writes about the contemplation of Kandinsky’s abstract or figurative paintings, about his ink drawings or his wood engravings, but also more generally about the contemplation of every possible form of painting, of drawing, of engraving or of sculpture: “So if we are essentially force and affect, then lines and colours allow the luminous emergence of our deepest being.” [117][118] For Michel Henry as well as for Kandinsky, the true mission of art in general, and of painting and music in particular, is simply to exert an “inner” or “spiritual” action on the soul, that’s to say in reality an action on the interiority of life, on affectivity and on the feeling who habits us permanently, a spiritual action which is fundamentally to allow abandoned men and women of our time to find in themselves the “path to eternal life” and “to arrive at happiness”, through the refinement of our auditory and visual sensibility, and of wonder, this “increased” or more refined sensibility can produce in each one of us, in contact with artworks.
It is trapped into what in The Essence of Manifestation Michel Henry calls "ontological monism"; it completely ignores the invisible interiority of life, its radical immanence and its original mode of revelation which is irreducible to any form of transcendence or to any exteriority.
[166] According to Catherine Meyor, “the functional, instrumental and therapeutic statuses seem to obscure, in part or in whole, this property which is nevertheless unavoidable and inalienable in affective experience, its sensitive essence.
[167] As Catherine Meyor writes again, at the conclusion of a section devoted to the questioning of educational approaches to affectivity: “This subjectivity which passes through the modes of sensitivity in order to make itself felt and to experience itself, which is fundamentally affectivity: feeling and desire constitutive of the world, which is also the first point of culture, which is full presence working for its own amplification, which also exceeds itself, which, in a classic word, condenses the "human condition", it is there, below and beyond any functional and therapeutic mode, what interests us, since both "in" and "after" managerial approaches, it remains intact and brilliant, undamaged by the trials of its resolution.” [168] His works on Christianity seem rather to have disappointed certain professional theologians and Catholic exegetes, who contented themselves with picking out and correcting what they considered as "dogmatic errors".
[170] On the other hand, Antoine Vidalin published in 2006 a book entitled La parole de la Vie (The Word of Life) in which preface the Professor at the Institut d'Etudes Théologiques from Brussels Jean-Marie Hennaux says that Michel Henry's phenomenology of life "allows for a renewed approach to every area of theology"[171] and that his philosophy "will allow the renewal and deepening of many theological questions".
[172] As Alain David says in an article published in the French journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger (number 3, July – September 2001),[173] the thought of Michel Henry seems so radical, it affects our habitual ways of thinking so deeply, that it has had a difficult reception, even if all his readers declare themselves impressed by its "power", by the "staggering effect" of a thought which "sweeps everything clean on its way through", which "prompts admiration", but nevertheless "doesn’t really convince", as we don't know whether we are confronted by "the violence of a prophetic voice or by pure madness".
The ego cogito (or the affirmation “I think, so I am”) is undeniable evidence or a first truth, so it is for Michel Henry the starting point and the true beginning of knowledge.
A problem to which he searches a solution into intentionality, which delivers according to Michel Henry the self-revelation of absolute subjectivity to the “anonymous”, depriving it “of every assignable phenomenological status”.
The “extraordinary” and unconscious path followed by the Husserl thought to try to overcome the aporia to which he was confronted is for Michel Henry “the striking proof of the non-ekstatic status of life”, that's to say of the fact that it never manifests itself in the exteriority of a seeing.
According to him, the experience of the other and by consequence the relation to others doesn't funds on intentionality or on “the opening to the alterity of a world”, but on the opposite on life which provides paradoxically “the milieu or the medium in which all possible intersubjectivity can take place”.
[208][209][210] According to Maine de Biran, the being or the reality of the ego does not reside in the immobility of substance-thought, as in the cogito of Descartes, but in the inner experience of a personal and purely subjective effort in its accomplishment.
[211][212][213] The depth of the philosophy of Maine de Biran resides according to Michel Henry in the affirmation that the true being of the movement, but also of the action and of the power of the ego is accurately that of a cogito or of a subjectivity.
[216][217][218] According to Michel Henry, the world consists in the totality of the contents of all experiences that can live or feel our subjective body, it is in reality the terminus or the limit of all our real, possible and imaginable movements that we can accomplish.
[221][222] Michel Henry undertook a study of the historical and philosophical genesis of psychoanalysis in the light of phenomenology of life in Généalogie de la psychanalyse, le commencement perdu (Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, the Lost Beginning), in which he shows that the Freudian notion of the unconscious results from the inability of Freud, its founder, to think the essence of life in its purity as affectivity and auto-affection.
[231][232] One reason why Marx's genuine thought has been so misunderstood is the complete ignorance of his fundamental philosophical writings during the development of the official doctrine of Marxism, due to their very late publication — for example, The German Ideology only appeared in 1932.
[238] Marxism is according to Michel Henry a form of fascism, i.e. a doctrine which originates in the degradation of the individual whose elimination is considered as legitimate,[239][240] whereas capitalism substitutes economic entities such as money, profit or interest for the real needs of life.
[289][290] In the modern world, we are almost all condemned from childhood to flee our anguish and our proper life in the mediocrity of the media universe — an escape from self and dissatisfaction which leads to violence — rather than resorting to the most highly developed traditional forms of culture which enable the overcoming of this suffering and its transformation into joy.
[296] He explores painting's means of form and colour, and studies their effects on the inner life of one who looks at them filled with wonder, following the rigorous and almost phenomenological analysis proposed by Kandinsky.
[302] The problem of evil is that of the inner and phenomenological "death" of the apparently or externally "living" individuals who do it; that is in reality, of the inner, affective and spiritual degeneration from their original condition of Son of God, when the life they carry in them "turns against itself" in the terrible phenomena of hate and resentment.
[313] Michel Henry tells us in this book that the purpose of the coming of Christ into the world is to make the true Father manifest to people, and thus to save them from the forgetting of Life in which they stand.
[323] Although the flesh is traditionally understood as the seat of sin, in Christianity it is also the place of salvation, which consists in the deification of man, i.e. in the fact of becoming the Son of God, of returning to the eternal and absolute Life we had forgotten in losing ourselves in the world, in caring only about things and ourselves.
[328][329] In the night of lovers, the sexual act couples two impulsive movements, but erotic desire fails to attain the pleasure of the other just there where it is experienced, in a complete loving fusion.