Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Mikel Dufrenne at the Limits of Theological Phenomenological Cosmology: A Constructive Proposal

This dissertation develops a theological phenomenological cosmology in light of Christian revelation by examining the fundamental structures of incarnate lived experience as described by Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Mikel Dufrenne in order to understand better the significance of Christian revelation upon the cosmic stage. Critical analysis of the cosmological implications of Henry’s and Marion’s phenomenological frameworks, derived primarily from their frequently overlooked texts on art and aesthetic experience (e.g., Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky and Courbet, ou la Peinture à l’Œil), demonstrates how Henry’s exclusion of representation from the domain of life and Marion’s subversion of representation in favor of absolute givenness and saturated phenomenality give rise to hyper-subjectivist and hyper-objectivist schemata respectively. In their theological articulations, these schemata fail to provide cosmological frameworks that uphold the subject’s concrete, free, dynamic, and creative relation to cosmos.

This dissertation retrieves Mikel Dufrenne’s non-theological phenomenological framework in order to surpass the limitations of Henry’s and Marion’s schemata. Dufrenne’s restoration of the phenomenological effectivity of representation and transcendence, it argues, yields an integral and temporal conception of both the enfleshed body and life qua desire that restores the incarnate subject’s concrete presence to the cosmos, while at the same time offering a dynamic and temporal conception of Nature that forms the backbone of his cosmological schema. These advances allow a theological retrieval of Dufrenne’s project to consider the New Testament record of the person of Christ in the development of a new, Dufrennian philosophy of Christianity modeled on Henry’s own. The result is a panentheistic theological phenomenological cosmology. In this cosmological schema, Christ makes explicit as an object for reflective knowledge the implicit, affective knowledge that human persons have of the divine Life in the depths of their enfleshed bodies inasmuch as they are children of God, while himself remaining a distinct form of Life’s revelation. Re-birth in the divine Life through acts of love as revealed by Christ, this dissertation then argues, sits alongside other authentic avenues of re-birth in Life independent of specifically Christian revelation (e.g., aesthetic experience) as preeminently but not exclusively contributing to the human person’s existential project of self-actualization and self-realization in Life.