How to Overcome the World: Henry, Heidegger, and the Post-Secular

Abstract

If there is such a ‘post-secular’ milieu, mindset, or thesis, it will need to furnish its own interpretation of the ‘world’ in ways distinct from those championed by the secular. Indeed an essential aspect of the ‘secular’ is how it has interpreted the ‘world’ (kosmos) as the ‘space, time, and age’ (Latin saecularis) in which things come into presence clearly, neutrally, and obviously. This paper interprets and compares some of Heidegger’s (especially the Heraclitus Seminars) and Henry’s (especially ‘Phenomenology of Life’) specific engagements with the theme of ‘world’, and how each thinker claims the world itself is presentable as a phenomenon, namely, via disclosive moods and the self-revelation of life. Since the world can appear, and its phenomenality can be presented, an inquiry into the specific, inconspicuous means by which the experiences of the world’s neutrality, clarity, and obviousness might yield phenomenological description. What presents itself as neutral is precisely what demands attention by merit of its hiddenness.