According to Michel Henry, the fundamental goal of art in general, and in particular of music as it is understood by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer or of abstract painting as conceived by its founder Wassily Kandinsky, is simply to use musical means that are sounds or musical notes, as well as pictorial means that are forms and colors, to express “this continual emergence of life” or “its eternally living essence” which is called an emotion.Michel Henry, Voir l’invisible, éd. François Bourin, 1988, p. 24 et 33-34.Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, ed. Continuum, 2009, p. 10 and 16. That’s this emotion or this ensemble of emotions that the artist feels in himself and that he wants to share with others and to transmit to the auditor or that he searches to awake in the spectator by means of his musical or pictorial work, “this profusion of life in him, its intensification and exaltation”.Michel Henry, Voir l’invisible, éd. François Bourin, 1988, p. 33-34.Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, ed. Continuum, 2009, p. 16.
