Phenomenology is arguably the philosophical tradition that has mostly underlined the affective character of our relationship with the world we dwell in. Differentiated in a kaleidoscope of phenomena, affectivity seems however to belong exclusively to the givenness of the world of values, covering like a film the material objects constituted in bare perception and always-already presenting us with a personalistichen Welt. Keeping in mind that for Husserl is an “abstraction” from value-predicates that faces us with the Welt bloßer Sachen, one may nevertheless ask if affectivity doesn’t already play a role in the givenness of the bare material world.
In my presentation, I will support this idea following the phenomenology of affectivity developed by the French phenomenologist Michel Henry. In the first part, I will expound Henry’s conception of affectivity qua self-manifestation of consciousness. Equated with such a “pre-reflective self-awareness” (to use Zahavi’s formula), affectivity is conceived by Henry as the fundamental dimension of phenomenality grounding the intentional constitution of the world.
Consequently, Henry characterises the world as a proper monde affectif, including of course nature as the non-value-related layer of material things. In order to elucidate this seemingly-paradoxical thesis, in the second part of my talk I will turn toward Henry’s theory of action, pivoted on the affective self-manifestation of the transcendental correlation between the “organic body” as “power-to-move” and the “reality of the world” as “absolute resistance”. In conclusion, I will argue that Henry succeeds in outlining a practical-affective givenness of the world’s materiality, while however failing in providing an account of the intentional constitution of material things as Einheiten des Sinnes. His insights are nonetheless valuable for clarifying the rootedness of the material world onto the affective self-manifestation of our praxis.