In keeping with the theme of embodiment found in my essay of the April Issue of Epoché (2021), I will now move to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding of the body. This shift in interest is important for two reasons. Firstly, by understanding Sartre’s philosophical investigation of the body we can begin to see the diversity of thought that composes the question of embodiment within the twentieth century French existential tradition. Secondly, by examining Sartre’s phenomenological approach we are also better equipped to distinguish between ideas of the body that persist in the religious discourse (i.e., the French Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel) versus ones that are grounded in non-religious presuppositions. Indeed, it is my understanding that Sartre’s philosophy is a valuable cornerstone for accomplishing both of these perspectives.
My essay will be structured in the following manner. To begin, I will provide a background of Sartre’s literary attitude towards the body as well as his general phenomenological approach. Then, I will use Sartre’s section “The Body” in Being and Nothingness to examine his philosophical definition of embodiment in particular. Fundamentally, for Sartre, there are three ontological dimensions of embodiment: the body for Itself, the body for the Other, and the body for Itself as known by the Other. I will provide an interpretation of each dimension, thus, showing how they are interrelated with one another as well as form a larger picture of embodied existence. My overall conclusion is that Sartre’s understanding of the body is posited as a source of ontological contestation so long as we live in a social world.1placeholder
General Background
Sartre’s attitude towards the body is slightly ambivalent. He himself struggled with physical disability throughout his life. Therefore, in his texts concerning the body, not surprisingly, he writes as a kind of dualist in the sense that he sees the body as something to transcend, surpass, or ‘get out of’. In his novel Nausea, for instance, Sartre provides a scene in which the protagonist Roquentin is seen looking in the mirror and anxiously questioning his embodied schema. In disgust, Roquentin tries ardently to tear the flesh off of his face. At another moment in the story, in Cartesian fashion, Roquentin begins to perceive his hands as a cold object full of dead weight below and against his human consciousness, i.e., his mind. In this vein, we find Sartre’s motivations to explicitly reject the principle of ‘double-sensation’ as held by the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.2placeholder For Sartre, in contrast to these thinkers, the body does not necessarily ‘touch you back’ as though embodied consciousness is a life-giving form which awakens the higher parts of our experiences in the world. He suggests that a rejection of double-sensation can be proved by injecting oneself with morphine, which immobilizes the body and removes the ‘living’ component from it.3placeholder In short, for Sartre, the body remains a manipulable object for the human subject.
As one might assume, the body is a philosophical puzzle to Sartre. He believes that the fundamental problem of embodiment is found in the disunity between knowing the body inwardly (i.e., the way we exist the body in lived experience) versus knowing it externally (i.e., the way we understand the body and can make rational judgments about it). Sartre admits that there is an “inner intuition” of the body but we cannot bring this meaning into full relation with an external understanding of the body because this second kind of content ultimately stems from the knowledge that others have of it in which case the body is perceived at a distance from our living it as our own.4placeholder In other words, there is a difference between knowing we have a heart, stomach, brain, etc. versus knowing them as our own—as we ‘live them’. The way we know our embodied selves is, as Sartre puts it, lost “in the midst of the world” wherein our body is no longer ours but rather the substance of others.5placeholder For Sartre, this remains an ontological conundrum in which our very essence is at stake.6placeholder In order to render the meaning of Sartre’s portentous statements more transparent, I will now provide a detailed discussion of his section “The Body” in Being and Nothingness. In this way, I hope to make clear some of the deeper meanings that undergird his ideas of the body.
The Ontological Dimensions of the Body
Sartre’s treatment of the body is on the one hand hostile while on the other hand richly dynamic. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre provides an analysis of embodiment by way of three ontological dimensions. The first is the body for Itself which relates to Sartre’s notion of facticity and the first-person attempt to transcend it. The second dimension is understood to be the body for the Other in which the individual becomes objectified from the third-person point of view. The third ontological dimension is the body for Itself as known by the Other. This last distinction is unique in the sense that Sartre combines the first two cases of embodiment to further clarify the ontological dimension of what individuals do as they are being watched or caught under the ‘gaze’ of another.
In the first ontological dimension, the body for Itself, Sartre argues that our engagement with the world is one in which the body is constantly at play and always implicit in the field of action.7placeholder The body for Sartre is the psychic object par excellence; it is always there and operating, even in our dreams.8placeholder We cannot explicitly see it but we have an ‘inner perception’ of it.
For Sartre, human consciousness is intertwined with embodied experience. The body is indicative of our facticity, that is, we are automatically endowed with a body and can utilize it for particular tasks as we see fit. However, this does not mean that the body for ourselves is wholly a physical object nor does it mean that the body is entirely a stream of consciousness. It is somewhere in between; it is the lived body.9placeholder As Sartre puts it: “I exist my body.”10placeholder For instance, when I write I use my hand to direct the pen as it draws out the letters on the paper. Although, the object of my consciousness is the writing and not my hand, still, “I am my hand.”11placeholder The hand is there as a given, like a piece of equipment, but it is not the entire point of attention. In other words, the way in which we experience our bodies is both at a distance in which body parts and organs are ‘outside’ or ‘below’ consciousness as well as immediately through our bodies which equally instantiates us in the world.
For Sartre, our knowledge of the world is “engaged.” He writes: “’To be is to-be-there’ … ‘there in that chair,’ ‘there at that table.’” This kind of engagement with the world is an ontological necessity.12placeholder The simple fact that we have a body is proof of our contingency in the world; there are natural limits to what we can and cannot do. Furthermore, it is this spatio-temporal contingency in which things are in front of us or behind us or ‘not within our reach’ that, for Sartre, revivifies the “upsurge” of the body for Itself to utilize and manipulate things to our advantage. As Sartre writes in poetic fashion:
“Thus, the world from the moment of the upsurge of my For-itself is revealed as the indication of acts to be performed; these acts refer to other acts, and those to others, and so on […]. The thing perceived is full of promises; it touches me lightly in passing, and each of the properties which it promises to reveal to me; each surrender silently consented to, each meaningful reference to other objects engages the future.”13placeholder
In other words, the body puts us into relation with the world and what we make of it; the body grounds us in the contingency of lived experience the goal of which is to constantly surpass our situational horizons. While we as individuals cannot escape perpetual, bodily contingency, it nevertheless remains incumbent on us to constantly overcome it—to be more than an object with physical dimensions. “The very nature of the for-itself demands that it be body; that is, that, its nihilating escape from being should be made in the form of an engagement in the world.”14placeholder We are trapped in the facticity of our given bodies while simultaneously yearning to overcome their contingent reality.
In his discussion of the body for Itself, Sartre diverges briefly and recalls the time when he volunteered for a medical experiment. He was placed in an examination room and, as he says, “remained in the Other’s presence.”15placeholder He writes that as a reflective subject he could apprehend other objects in the room (e.g., the table, the screen, the lights, etc.); however, as an embodied subject the doctor apprehended him as a mere object among these other objects. As Sartre puts it: “The illumination of the screen belonged to my world; my eyes as objective organs belonged to the world of the experimenter.” Previously perceiving himself as a transcendent subject, Sartre subsequently became transcended by the doctor who reduced him to a thing quite literally among other things in the room. In this way, Sartre’s body was no longer for Itself; it became increasingly thematized by the Other. This example frames Sartre’s second ontological dimension: the body for the Other.
As opposed to the first distinction of embodiment, in which the body is entirely within the realm of first-person responsibly and action (i.e., the body for Itself), the second distinction (i.e., the body for the Other) shifts to the body as now under the third-person viewpoint of another subject—the body’s “other plane of existence.”16placeholder Sartre construes human corporeity in these terms: “Either it [the body] is a thing among other things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot be both at the same time.”17placeholder This more succinctly frames the difference between the body for Itself and the body for the Other; they are two distinct spheres of being. The body for the Other is the place wherein any kind of knowledge of the embodied self necessarily stems from the Other, as opposed to the body for Itself in which our understanding stems from ourselves alone. For instance, the location and operations of organs are all accounted by means of the Other; the anatomy textbooks and medical studies which provide this information are explicitly not our own.18placeholder According to Sartre, in the second ontological dimension the way that we understand ourselves is inherently geared towards the Other.
Paradoxically, it is the fact that the body for the Other proves that my body, without a point of view, can still assert a point of view. “Because of the mere fact that I am not the Other, his body appears to me originally as a point of view on which I can take a point of view.”19placeholder In other words, we can invert the relationship and become the Other’s Other—their body ‘becomes ours’. My relationship to the Other as an embodied subject can supplement or disrupt my relationship to my own body and vice versa. Importantly, for Sartre, this becomes a place of conflict between the body for Itself and the body for the Other.
Sartre believes that the body for the Other persists in competition with the body for Itself in the sense that both are aimed at transcending things in the world. As seen in the above example of the medical experiment, Sartre’s own transcendence of the objects in the room was further transcended by the doctor himself who was studying Sartre’s body like another object. This kind of encounter with the Other alienated Sartre as an embodied subject and turned him into “being-a-tool-among-tools.”20placeholder In this way, his subjectivity was relegated to a third-person point of view in which bodily movements and the possibility for engagement with the world entered the domain of another. Sartre refers to this ontological shift as transcendence—transcended, that is, our subjective transcendence over objects has been further transcended by another subject who monopolizes and reduces our first-person stance in the world.21placeholder Consequently, we no longer maintain the subject-object distinction over the world; our field of action has become distorted in so far as we become the object for another subject.
We are now better able to approach and understand the final distinction of embodiment in Sartre’s account. The third and final ontological dimension is the body for Itself as known by the Other. This phenomenological distinction becomes most apparent “with the appearance of the Other’s look.”22placeholder Here, Sartre brings his account of the body to summation and frames it in terms of an intersubjective relationship between Myself in action and the Other who watches.
We must briefly recall that for Sartre the “the depth of our being” exists perpetually outside of us, that is, our inner, lived experience always occurs and is made apparent in the midst of the world.23placeholder ‘Being-there’, no matter how personal we might conceive of it, remains a constant dimension of the Other. Our lived body escapes us because it is always ‘out there’ and not just ‘in here’. This is why the Other looms so large in Sartre’s account of lived experience. As Sartre states: “The shock of the encounter with the Other is for me a revelation in emptiness of the existence of my body outside as an in-itself for the Other.”24placeholder The body does maintain an outward point of orientation in the world but it also is that which has no inward point of view on itself. To have an understanding of ourselves necessitates the presence of others; consciousness is fundamentally an intersubjective experience. Moreover, this becomes even more dramatic once we realize that the natural limitations that we have are further exacerbated by our interactions with others.
As we go about our business we engage with our surroundings (i.e., seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, etc.), but as soon as the Other enters into our horizons these sense perceptions now disintegrate into a new plane of possibilities which the Other has now introduced into our own field of action. “Thus at the very moment when I live my senses as this inner point of view on which I can take no point of view, their being-for-others haunts me: they are. For the Other, my senses are as this table or as this tree is for me.”25placeholder In the body for Itself as known by the Other, our consciousness of the world shifts channels and becomes redirected towards that of the Other. Once we come into contact with the Other our facticity becomes even more dramatic because the ‘look’ of the Other catches us in the moment. Again, the example of the doctor and the patient proves useful. The doctor presses the stethoscope against my chest listening intently to my breathing patterns and objectifying me in my anatomical form; I, in turn, sit there patiently as the ground for the doctor’s actions. I become the contingent material (i.e., my body in Itself) for the Other’s transcendence. I am trapped in this perspective of the body as known by the Other. In short, my world becomes overtaken by their world. In order to surpass this situation, according to Sartre, it is imperative to transcend my facticity given by the look of the Other and, so, reassert my body for Itself and regain control of it as my field of action.
The example of shyness (what Sartre refers to as personal alienation) is perhaps the peak and pinnacle of this intersubjective drama of the ontological dimensions of the body. Sartre argues that we do not feel shyness because of the way in which we know our bodies.26placeholder In other words, we cannot be alone and shy at the same time. Without the Other, there is no mechanism at work in which we could see our bodies through discomfort. Rather, Sartre suggests that we are shy for another reason: for the way in which the Other knows our body while we carry out particular tasks. This sense of shyness intensifies the more that the Other appears to us. The experience of feeling shy, therefore, occurs when the growing presence of the Other shrouds us in a third-person point of view, creating a deep sense of personal anxiety and vertigo. For instance, we become shy while standing on stage meanwhile hundreds of eyes bear down on us in one fell swoop. Or, we might feel shy due to the lights blinding our vision of the audience, rendering our lived bodies totally exposed to the diminishment of an Other that we cannot see but which nevertheless makes us feel naked. Furthermore, while on stage, we cannot surpass their knowledge of us—their Look—there is an existential chasm between us. We are locked in a facticity of which we cannot escape. The body for Itself as known by the Other inflicts great unease on us as we exist in social interactions.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have provided a discussion of Sartre’s interpretation of embodiment. I have shown his three ontological dimensions of embodiment: the body for Itself, the body for the Other, and the body for Itself as known by the Other. In each case we learned that embodied consciousness is a deeply interpersonal experience in which the presence of the Other rises in relation to how we understand ourselves. Importantly, for Sartre, human corporeity cannot escape this reality. We, therefore, must learn to cope with the implications that the body is ours in as much as it is also theirs. If we as individuals want to uncover the essence of who we are, then our orientation towards this existential question necessarily involves others. How they perceive us and act in relation to us implicitly feeds into our own conception of ourselves. This dynamic can be highly conflictual due to a vastly social world wherein individuals are constantly under the watchful eyes of others. Sartre’s phenomenology aptly demonstrates the intricacies and effects associated with such kinds of situations.
Works Cited
Dolezal, Luna. “Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness.’” Sartre Studies International 18, no. 1 (2012): 9-28.
Moran, Dermot. “Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation.’” Philosophy Today (2010): 135-141.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1956.
–. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1969.
–. The Wall. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1975.
–. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Although the implications for this conclusion are profoundly important, they would require further discussion that would exceed the scope of this essay alone.
See Dermot Moran, “Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation,’” Philosophy Today (2010): 138.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 304.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 303.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 303.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 305.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 347.
See Dermot Moran, “Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation,’” 136.
Dermot Moran,“Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the ‘Double Sensation,’” 136.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 351.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 323.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 308.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 322.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 309.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 311.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 339.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 304.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 303.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 340.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 352.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 339, 291-292.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 351.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 352.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 352.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 352.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 353.