The life is traditionally understood on an exterior point of view as an ensemble of objective properties which define the life in the biological sense of the term, that of the material body.
Nevertheless, the life possesses an inner component which is the concern of the most radical subjectivity, of an absolute immanence sphere in which we are permanently immerged and with which we coincide.
In a sens, the life is the most simple, but the most simple is also often what is the most difficult to think. This is the immense merit of the phenomenological work of the philosopher Michel Henry to have reduced the life notion to the essential, because it is simply what we are, the foundation and the essence of the manifestation, which is the auto-affection.
We know what is the life in an absolute knowledge which precedes all knowledge and all philosophy because we are livings, we already belong to this life that we know from the interior, which founds our being and every one of our powers, as for example the thought.
Michel Henry defines the life in a phenomenological point of view as what possesses the faculty and the power to feel and to experience oneself in every point of its being. For Michel Henry, the life is essentially force and affect, it consists in a pure experience of itself which oscillates permanently between the suffering and the joy. He opposes radically the living flesh and the material body in its book « Incarnation, a philosophy of the flesh ».
