The phenomenology of the life is part of the Phénoménologie which explores the concept of the Vie.

The philosopher Michel Henry defines the life from a phenomenologic point of view as what has faculty and the capacity “to feel and to test oneself in any point of its being”. For him, the life is primarily subjective force and affectivity, it consists of a pure subjective experiment of oneself which oscillates permanently between the suffering and the joy. A “subjective force” is not a force impersonal, blind and insensitive like are the objective forces which one meets in nature, but a tested force alive and significant interior and resulting from a subjective desire and a subjective effort of the will to satisfy it. It also establishes a radical opposition between the alive flesh endowed with sensitivity and the material body, which is by insensitive principle, in its book Incarnation, a philosophy of the flesh .

This phenomenologic life is essentially invisible because it never appears in the externality one to see, it appears in itself without variation nor distance. The fact of seeing indeed supposes the existence of a distance and a separation between what is seen and that which sees it, between the object which is perceived and the subject which perceives it. A feeling for example never sees outside, it never appears in “the horizon of visibility” of the world, it feels and tests interior in the radical immanence of the life. The love is not seen, not more than hatred, the feelings feel in the secrecy of our heart, where no glance cannot penetrate.

This life is made up of the sensitivity and of affectivity, it is the interior unit of their demonstration, affectivity being however the gasoline of the sensitivity as Michel Henry in his book shows it on the gasoline of the demonstration , which means that any feeling is emotional by nature. The phenomenologic life is according to Michel Henry the base of all our subjective experiments (like the subjective experiment of a sadness, vision of a color or pleasure of drinking fresh water in summer) and of each one of our subjective capacities (subjective capacity to move our hand or our eyes for example).

For more precise details on the phenomenologic life, to see the article on the Philosophy of the life, like that on the Truth (left devoted to the Truth the Life).