The chapter titled “The Body” in Being and Nothingness offers a ground-breaking, if somewhat neglected, philosophical analysis of embodiment. Written in Sartre’s customary dialectical style, it is dense, difficult, confused, original, insightful, brilliant. As part of his “essay on phenomenological ontology,” he is proposing a new multi-dimensional ontological approach to the body. For Sartre, traditional philosophy has misunderstood the body because the orders of knowing and being have been conflated or inverted. Sartre begins from but creatively develops phenomenological discussions of embodiment found in Husserl (without direct access to Ideas II), Scheler, and Heidegger. In the background, of course, is an established—and predominantly French—tradition of physiological/psychological discussion of the body in relation to consciousness found in Descartes, Condillac, Maine de Biran, Comte, Bergson, Brunschwicg, Pradines, Marcel, Bachelard, and others, authors with whom Sartre was familiar. Indeed, Sartre provisionally maps out much of the ground later retraced by Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and posthumous The Visible and the Invisible (1964). For instance, Sartre discusses the artificiality of the psychological concept of sensation, the intrinsic temporality of experience, the Muller-Lyer illusion, the “double sensation” (one hand touching the other), Gestalt figure-ground structures, and so on. But in many ways, especially in his discussion of fleshly intercorporeity, he goes beyond Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, Sartre introduces the notion of “flesh” (la chair), now more usually associated with Merleau-Ponty. For Sartre, flesh is the locus of contingency and intercorporeity. Flesh is “the pure contingency of presence” (BN 343/410). More importantly, my flesh constitutes the other’s flesh, especially in the acts of touching and caressing:
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Aug 6, 2010
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