Phénoménologie du pathos de la vie comme visée de maturité
Phenomenology of the pathos of life as a goal of maturity

Dominique Kahang’a Rukonkish, reading of Michel Henry

Summary/Abstract: The issue of Negro-African life and culture is hereby captured in the perspective of a radical phenomenology. By subscribing his radical philosophy of the pathos of life to a tradition rupture between Husserl and Heidegger, the French philosopher Michel Henry intended to lead a breakthrough. Rooted in the experience of the “pathos of life” that borders on reason sapiential in the Negro-African symbolic universe, the cosmos-vital existence of each individual, as Kahang apprehends, finds the base, “the matrix common to all cultures of Black Africa”. Our contribution proposes to highlight the link between classical phenomenology (transcendental) and radical (material) phenomenology. Considering the work of Michel Henry, we would like to argue that sapiential phenomenology draws the task of reconstruction of African identity in its cultural manifestations, in this case in the world of Negro-African life. Seized in its aim of maturity, our reflection places the truth of the man at the heart of the experience of life, where the relation to others makes one discover the other, as well as one’s self, a “pathos-with”. Moreover, it claims precisely the place of emergence and of accomplishment of an experiment of self-affection, where the symbolic animal (animal symbolicum) is confronted with the existential questions of finitude and death, banality of evil and guilt, justice and law, domination and violence, power and struggle for recognition.

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