Sartre on the Body (Philosophers in Depth)

Sartre on the Body Philosophers in Depth Series Editors: Stephen Boulter and Constantine Sandis Philosophers in Depth...

Author: Katherine Morris

35 downloads 1109 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Sartre on the Body

Philosophers in Depth Series Editors: Stephen Boulter and Constantine Sandis Philosophers in Depth is a series of themed edited collections focusing on particular aspects of the thought of major figures from the history of philosophy. The volumes showcase a combination of newly commissioned and previously published work with the aim of deepening our understanding of the topics covered. Each book stands alone, but taken together the series will amount to a vast collection of critical essays covering the history of philosophy, exploring issues that are central to the ideas of individual philosophers. This project was launched with the financial support of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford Brookes University, for which we are very grateful. Constantine Sandis and Stephen Boulter Oxford Titles include: Katherine Morris (editor) SARTRE ON THE BODY Charles R. Pigden (editor) HUME ON MOTIVATION AND VIRTUE Sabine Roeser REID ON ETHICS Daniel Whiting (editor) THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE Forthcoming titles: Leonard Kahn MILL ON JUSTICE Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis HEGEL ON ACTION

Philosophers in Depth Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–55411–5 Hardback and 978–0–230–55412–2 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Sartre on the Body Edited by

Katherine J. Morris Mansfield College, Oxford

Selection and editorial matter © Katherine J. Morris 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21967–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Sartre on the Body Katherine J. Morris

1

Part I Context and Clarification 1 The Body and the Book: Reading Being and Nothingness Joseph S. Catalano

25

2 Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation’ Dermot Moran

41

3 Sartre and the Lived Body: Negation, Non-Positional Self-Awareness and Hodological Space Adrian Mirvish

67

4 Sartre and Marcel on Embodiment: Re-evaluating Traditional and Gynocentric Feminisms Constance L. Mui

84

Part II Critical Engagement 5 Representing Bodies Quassim Cassam

103

6 Resisting Sartrean Pain: Henry, Sartre and Biranism Michael Gillan Peckitt

120

7 Sartre and Death: Forgetting the Mortal Body in Being and Nothingness Christina Howells 8 Sexual Paradigms Robert C. Solomon

130 139

v

vi

Contents

9 Some Patterns of Identification and Otherness Phyllis Sutton Morris

148

Part III Continuing the Conversation 10 The Phenomenology of Clumsiness Katherine J. Morris

161

11 Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith Lewis R. Gordon

183

12 Sartre in the Company of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Duden Monika Langer

200

13 Body, Technique and Reflexivity: Sartre in Sociological Perspective Nick Crossley

215

14 The Socially Shaped Body and the Critique of Corporeal Experience Elizabeth A. Behnke

231

Index of Names

256

Preface When Constantine Sandis, one of the editors of this series, invited me to put together a volume on Sartre with a theme of my own choosing, I had not a moment of hesitation about the choice. Despite the keen interest in human bodies in Anglo-American humanities and social sciences departments in recent decades, Sartre’s contributions to the phenomenology of the body remain relatively neglected – unjustly so, I believe, as I hope this volume demonstrates. Each volume in the series includes both previously published and newly commissioned pieces. The previously published items are all, each in their own way, classics; others no doubt might have made different choices. The guiding idea governing the overall mix of articles, both old and new, apart of course from quality, was diversity. Despite the fact that all the contributors are or were based in North America or the British Isles, and that most (though not all) are philosophers, the contributions exhibit an immense variety, reflecting both the multiple perspectives which the authors bring to Sartre and Sartre’s multifaceted thinking about bodies. I am grateful to Constantine for the invitation to contribute to this series. I have been delighted at the overwhelmingly positive response I have had to the theme from all those I invited to contribute, even those who, owing to other commitments, have had to refuse. Although I have not met all of the contributors face to face, I feel as though I have got to know each of them, both through their essays for this volume and through our e-mail correspondences. I thank each one of them.

vii

Acknowledgements The following essays were previously published elsewhere and are reprinted here as Chapters 5 (Cassam), 1 (Catalano), 9 (Morris), 4 (Mui) and 8 (Solomon). They are reproduced as they appeared in the original; the only editorial changes are to the system of references, to achieve conformity with the rest of the volume. Quassim Cassam (2002), ‘Representing bodies’, in Ratio (new series) XV (December), 315–34. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Blackwell. Joseph S. Catalano (1998), ‘The body and the book: reading Being and Nothingness’. In J. Stewart, ed. The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ch. 11. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Phyllis Sutton Morris (1982), ‘Some patterns of identification and otherness’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13: 216–25. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Jackson. Constance Mui (1999), ‘Sartre and Marcel on embodiment: re-evaluating traditional and gynocentric feminisms’. In J. S. Murphy, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Sartre, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, ch. 5. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Robert C. Solomon (1974), ‘Sexual paradigms’, Journal of Philosophy 71: 11. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and Kathleen Higgins. All other essays were commissioned for this volume and are published here for the first time.

viii


Elizabeth A. Behnke (Betsy) is the Coordinator and Senior Research Fellow of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body (founded in 1987, and now located in the US Pacific Northwest). Her recent publications include essays on affectivity and on phenomenological methodology, as well as on bodily relationality, bodily protentionality and the relevance of transcendental phenomenology for transformative somatic practice. She is the co-editor of two book series with Zeta Books (Pathways in Phenomenology and Patterns in Applied Phenomenology). Quassim Cassam currently teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (UK), after a number of years as a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford University (UK). He has a particular interest in Kant and self-knowledge; his publications include Self and World (Oxford University Press, 1997) and The Possibility of Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback 2009). Joseph S. Catalano, Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy Department, Kean University of New Jersey (US), is the author of a number of books on Sartre and Sartrean themes, including A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (University of Chicago Press, 1980), Good Faith and Other Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995) and Thinking Matter (Routledge, 2000). Nick Crossley is Professor and current Head of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. In addition to many papers, he has published two books on the sociology of embodiment: The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (Sage, 2001) and Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Much of his work on embodiment engages with the work of MerleauPonty. He has also written about the wider significance of Merleau-Ponty’s work for issues in sociology and social theory. Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Jewish Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, USA, where he also co-directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also the Jay Newman Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College. He is the author of several influential and award-winning books, such as Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanity Books, 1995), Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), which won the Gustavus Myer Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights in North America, Existentia Africana (Routledge, 2000), Disciplinary Decadence (Paradigm, 2006) and An Introduction to Africana ix

x


Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is President Emeritus of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Christina Howells is Professor of French at the University of Oxford, UK and a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. She works on twentieth-century French literature and thought, and situates herself somewhere between Continental Philosophy and Literary Theory. She has published extensively on Sartre, including Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and the Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge University Press, 1992). She has also published on Derrida – Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Polity Press, 1998) – and most recently she edited a collection of essays by contemporary French theorists entitled French Women Philosophers: Subjectivity, Identity, Alterity (Routledge, 2004). She is currently exploring conceptions of mortality, subjectivity and passion in recent French philosophers. Monika Langer is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Previously, she taught at the University of Toronto, Yale University, the University of Alberta and Dalhousie University. Her articles have appeared in various books and journals. She is the author of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide and Commentary (Macmillan, 1989). She has just completed a book on Nietzsche’s Gay Science, to be published in 2010. Adrian Mirvish has published widely in continental philosophy. His main interests in Sartre lie in the areas of ontology and existential psychoanalysis. He is currently co-editing an anthology, entitled New Perspectives on Sartre, with Adrian van den Hoven of the University of Windsor. He is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, US. Dermot Moran holds the Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at University College, Dublin, Eire. He has published widely on medieval philosophy and contemporary European philosophy. His books include Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2000) and Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity Press, 2005). He has edited, among others, The Phenomenology Reader, with Tim Mooney (Routledge, 2002), and Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 vols., with Lester E. Embree (Routledge, 2004). He is the founding editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and is currently completing a monograph, Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences: An Introduction for Cambridge University Press. Katherine J. Morris is a fellow in philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, UK. Her books include Descartes’ Dualism (with Gordon Baker, Routledge, 1996) and Sartre (Blackwell Great Minds series, 2008), and has published widely on Descartes, Wittgenstein, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. She will be bringing out a book on Merleau-Ponty in 2010 as part of Continuum’s


xi

Starting With series. She also co-edits the series International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry for Oxford University Press. Phyllis S. Morris taught in a number of philosophy departments, most recently at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio (USA), until her death in 1997. She, together with William McBride, helped to found the still flourishing North American Sartre Society. Her Sartre’s Concept of a Person (University of Massachusetts Press, 1976) was one of the earliest studies of Sartre in English to put him into dialogue with analytic philosophers, and was followed by numerous articles on Sartre. Constance Mui is a Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University in New Orleans, LA (USA). She works on feminist theory, phenomenology, embodiment and Marxism and is the co-editor, with Julien Murphy, of Gender Struggles: Contemporary Approaches to Feminist Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Michael Gillan Peckitt has just completed his PhD, ‘Heidegger and the Philosophy of Life’, at the Department of Humanities, the University of Hull, UK. His interests are in phenomenology, German idealism and lifephilosophy. He also has written on the phenomenology of pain. He is currently working on an analysis of Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation. Robert C. Solomon was for many years the Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business at the University of Texas at Austin (USA), until his death in 2007. He wrote extensively on the emotions, sexual desire, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. His publications include The Passions (Doubleday, 1976), In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford, 1983), Continental Philosophy Since 1750 (Oxford, 1988), The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, with Kathleen M. Higgins (University Press of Kansas, 1991), and Living with Nietzsche (Oxford, 2003).

Abbreviations BN

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. E. Barnes. (Original French publication: see EN.) There are three widely used versions of this (dates refer to first printing): (1956). New York: Philosophical Library (cited in chapters by Catalano, Mirvish, Mui, Behnke) (1966). New York: Washington Square Press (cited in chapters by P. S. Morris, Gordon, Langer, Behnke) (1986). Routledge: London (cited in Introduction and chapters by Moran, Cassam, Peckitt, Howells, K. J. Morris, Crossley)

EN

Jean-Paul Sartre (1943). L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. (English translation: see BN.)

PP

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original French publication (1945): Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.)

xii

Introduction: Sartre on the Body Katherine J. Morris

Human bodies are not simply anatomical, physiological or physical objects. They are our very being-there in the world and that by which there is a world for us; they are that by which we act and express and that in which we feel; they are that which sediments the past and projects toward the future; they are that on whose surface power is inscribed and that by whose powers such power is ‘incorporated’; they are natural symbols, as well as the existential ground of culture. Despite the fact that ‘the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives’ (Leder 1990: 1), it has, until relatively recently, remained virtually unthematized within the humanities and the social sciences in Anglophone academia. By contrast, post-Kantian Continental philosophers, in a long tradition which includes Jean-Paul Sartre among others, have considered an investigation of the human body to be indispensable to any account of human reality. Indeed, many of the thinkers responsible for the major theoretical tools and frameworks for investigating the human body now being employed in a wide variety of disciplines in Anglophone academia have been post-Kantian Continental philosophers,1 or social scientists or feminist thinkers conversant with such philosophers. Over the past few decades, the sociology of the body has become an established subdiscipline, with a journal, Body and Society (established 1995), and readers aimed at sociology of the body courses (for example, Malacrida and Low eds. 2008).2 The anthropology of the body is rapidly catching up, perhaps particularly within medical anthropology; there are courses in anthropology of the body and readers (for example, Lock and Farquhar, eds. 2007), although as yet no journal devoted to this subdiscipline.3 Similar stories could be told about most other humanities and social science disciplines. The philosophy of the body is not at this stage an established subdiscipline in Anglophone academia: as one piece of evidence, it does not appear among ‘the more than 190 specialties listed by the Philosophy Documentation Center’ (Shusterman 2006: 18). Again, the well-known and widely respected online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no article on bodies.4 1

2

Katherine J. Morris

There are none the less a few readers and collections (for example, Spicker ed. 1970; Welton ed. 1998, 1999; Proudfoot ed. 2003), and a few graduate-level courses, on the philosophy of the body. As for Anglo-American philosophy departments, they do contain some highly influential theorists of the body, such as Don Ihde, Drew Leder, Richard Shusterman, and Richard Zaner, who may be seen as part of the post-Kantian Continental philosophy tradition, as well as many leading feminist contributors to thinking about bodies, such as Sandra Lee Bartky, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, and Iris Marion Young. Yet my sense is that these streams of thinking are widely seen as tributaries; ‘mainstream’ courses – say, in philosophy of mind and action, where one might expect explorations of the body as part of the treatment of the so-called mind/body problem, or action,5 or personal identity and personhood6 – continue largely untroubled by bodies. There are a handful of other, still relatively peripheral, contexts in which the body is beginning to be acknowledged in Anglo-American philosophy. One is the up-and-coming field of philosophy of psychiatry and psychopathology (for example, Stanghellini 2004; Matthews 2007). Here, too, the major theoreticians have been influenced by post-Kantian Continental thinkers such as Jaspers, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. There are in addition a number of more or less loosely defined ‘research groups’ and ‘projects’,7 some interdisciplinary, some of which are gradually being granted the acknowledged status of ‘approaches’.8 There is, for example, now talk of an ‘embodied cognition’ ‘approach’ (Gallagher 2005), which includes such thinkers as Varela et al. (1991), Clark (1997) and Damasio (1999). This stresses such notions as ‘neurophenomenology’, ‘embeddedness’ and ‘ongoing agent–environment interactions’; many of its practitioners look back to Merleau-Ponty and the psychologist J. J. Gibson.9 There are also the (partially overlapping) ‘spatial representation’ theorists (for example, Eilan et al. eds. 1993; Bermúdez et al. eds. 1995; Campbell 1995), some of whom explore the role of the body in our concepts of space and objectivity. Many of the philosophers in this group might be described as ‘post-Kantian Anglo-American’, taking their primary inspiration from P. F. Strawson’s (1959) and Gareth Evans’ (1982) ‘descriptive metaphysics’. Although post-Kantian Continental philosophy was not the inspiration of this stream, a few of them are beginning to engage with Merleau-Ponty, and one or two even with Sartre.10 No doubt there are others. This raises two questions: why has ‘the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives’ remained invisible to Anglo-American humanities and social science academics for so long? Why is it now coming into view? Philosophers within the phenomenological tradition are well placed to reflect on the first question. Drew Leder notes that this ‘most abiding and inescapable presence’ is ‘also essentially characterized by absence’ (1990: 1). What phenomenologists often call the ‘lived body’ is ‘invisible’ in at least two respects. First, the lived body is invisible as every familiar, taken-for-granted phenomenon is invisible; this is why phenomenologists

Introduction: Sartre on the Body

3

stress the need to recover ‘ “wonder” in the face of the world’ (PP xiii) and even to ‘re-learn to look at the world’ (PP xx). Secondly, our own bodies in ordinary fluent action are (as Sartre brings out: see below) the unperceived centre of the perceptive-cum-active field; indeed, a great deal of living actually requires that our awareness of our own body remains in the background: to focus on your feet and legs rather than the path before you is to court disaster. One might think of other, more contingent reasons for the invisibility of the lived body. One – the continuity in new guises of the ‘crisis’ that inspired Husserl to develop his methodology of phenomenology in the first place11 – is the predominance in many areas of life and in Anglo-American academia of a scientific rationality narrowly interpreted as a technical and technological rationality: a frame of mind that is reductive, atomistic, objectivist and scientistic. Such an outlook is by its very nature blind to the lived body and the life-world, what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts’ (PP 24). Another is simply lack of contrast: if the familiar is invisible in part because of its very familiarity, an unfamiliar variant can help to focus our attention on the familiar. There are pathological ways of living the body, for example, human beings who through injury have lost aspects of their lived body as the taken-for-granted centre of their life-world; but it is only relatively recently that such cases have entered the popular – and the Anglo-American nonscientific academic – consciousness, largely via the neurologist Oliver Sacks’ phenomenologically influenced accounts of his patients’ experiences of their own bodies (esp. 1985), and even his own experience of his body in injury (1990).12 This contingency is plausibly one key to our second question, since thinkers in the phenomenological tradition were acquainted with such cases far earlier (via, for instance, Gelb and Goldstein 1920).13 Social scientists such as Shilling (1993) add other important factors: for example, the development of so-called second-wave feminism, which has led, inter alia, to explorations of the medicalization and commodification of gendered bodies and more generally to reflection on ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as aspects of the body and embodiment; changes in consumer culture which have led to bodies increasingly becoming objects for self-presentation – ‘projects’, in Anthony Giddens’ terms; and developments which allow us to control our bodies technologically through hi-tech diets, weightlifting and cosmetic surgery. (See Orbach 2009 for a psychoanalyst’s view of the destabilizing effect of these aspects of modernity on our ‘body images’.) The philosopher Mike Proudfoot (2003: vii) adds the point that as computers become ever more ‘intelligent’, there is a growing interest in the living human body as a fundamental ground of difference between human beings and computers. Despite this burgeoning interest in the body, Sartre’s contributions remain relatively neglected. In a fairly typical passage, one philosopher cites La Mettrie, Diderot, Nietzsche and Foucault as passionate champions of ‘the bodily

4

Katherine J. Morris

dimension of human life’, with Sartre’s friend and contemporary, MerleauPonty, as ‘the patron saint of the body’ (Shusterman 2008: 49) – omitting, inter alia, Sartre. There are no doubt explanations for this neglect: his principal chapter on the body is tucked away, seemingly almost as an afterthought, in Part III (of four parts), chapter 2 (of three chapters) of Being and Nothingness (but see Catalano in this volume for a compelling explanation of this); and many commentators take Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of Sartre at face value (see below). This volume arises from the conviction that this neglect is unjustified. Sartre’s contributions merit recognition not merely as a matter of setting the historical record straight, important though that might be, but because they have a unique, intrinsic value of their own. If Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body is deeper than Sartre’s in some respects (just for instance, in his thematization of habits – relatively durable dispositions which have become ‘sedimented’ in the body through the repetition of actions), Sartre’s is far deeper in others (just for instance, in his focus on the body’s lived awareness of being under the Other’s objectifying gaze); so (for example) if Merleau-Ponty provides a better theoretical basis for the embodiment of culture, Sartre provides a better theoretical basis for the embodiment of oppression. Sartre’s analyses of the body continue to stimulate new thought, as I hope this volume amply illustrates. In what follows, I begin with a brief sketch of Sartre’s treatment of the body, largely using his own words and for the most part without comment. The following three sections develop this, in dialogue with the contributions to this volume.

Sartre on the body Sartre’s best-known work, BN, has a hefty chapter on the body. There are other sections in BN which elaborate further aspects of the body; there are also developments in later works, although this introduction and most of the contributions to this volume focus on BN. Because human reality is, in Heidegger’s famous phrase, ‘being-in-the-world’, and because the body is our being-there in the world, any description of the body, as we shall see repeatedly, has as its correlate a description of the world, that is, in Husserl’s terms, the Lebenswelt or life-world. Sartre begins his chapter on the body by noting that all the difficulties created by ‘the problem of the body and its relations with consciousness . . . stem from the fact that I try to unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others’ (BN 303). Thus he begins with a description of ‘my body’ – the body as ‘being-for-itself’ – which is in effect the subject of consciousness: ‘at once a point of view and a point of departure’ (BN 326). If consciousness is, as Sartre says, a relation, one of its relata is the body-for-itself; thus seen, ‘the problem of the body and its relations with consciousness’ cannot arise. He then argues, although this aspect of his account is less frequently stressed,


5

that the problem is exacerbated by the fact that we try to unite the other’s consciousness with ‘the body in the midst of the world’: ‘a certain living object composed of a nervous system, a brain, glands, digestive, respiratory and circulatory organs . . . ’ (BN 303). In fact, the body of the other is ‘ “psychic” ’: ‘being-for-others is wholly body; there are no “psychic phenomena” there to be united with the body. There is nothing behind the body. But the body is wholly “psychic” ’ (BN 305). Thus the being of human beings (being-for-itself) ‘must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness’ (BN 305). The ontological dimensions of the body (BN III.2; parts of BN III.1 for the second dimension) This introduction already indicates two ‘dimensions’ of the body: the body as being-for-itself (in other words, my own body as it is normally for me), and the body as being-for-others (my body as it normally appears to the other or, equivalently, the body of the other as it normally appears to me). A third ‘dimension’ is generated, so to speak, by the interaction between these two: my awareness of being an object for others means that I also ‘exist for myself as a body known by the other’ (BN 351). In this chapter Sartre identifies, in addition, a dimension of affectivity, revealed for example by illness, which he calls ‘my body on a new plane of existence . . . a psychic body’ (BN 337), and an ‘aberrant type of appearance’, when my own body ‘appears to me as one object among other objects’ (BN 357). The body as being-for-itself Heidegger’s term for human reality is Dasein: literally, ‘there-being’. Sartre begins his discussion of this dimension of the body by reminding us that ‘[f]or human reality, to be is to-be-there; that is, “there in that chair”, “there at that table” . . . ’ (BN 308). The body is the ‘thereness’ of the for-itself. The body as it is lived in everyday dealings with the world is the unperceived centre of the field of perception and the unutilizable centre of the field of action. And these fields of perception and action of which the lived body is the centre, which constitute our life-space. In fact these are not two fields but one, since perception and action are internally related: ‘at the end of this account sensation and action are rejoined’ (BN 325). What Sartre refers to as ‘the system of seen objects’ is oriented; there is a field of vision in which objects appear as ‘thises’ against a ground (BN 316). ‘It is necessary that the book appear to me on the right or on the left side of the table.’ Moreover, objects always appear ‘all at once – it is the cube, the inkwell, the cup which I see’, but at the same time always ‘in a particular perspective’ (BN 317). These orientations, this ordering, this perspectivity refer to a centre of the field, and that centre is my body. We may say that my body is my ‘point of view’ on the world, but this we must add is ‘the

6

Katherine J. Morris

point of view on which I can no longer take a point of view’ (BN 329). An investigation of action likewise shows that objects appear to us ‘at the heart of a complex of instrumentality’ (BN 321). Again, just as the orientation of the perceptual field indicates a centre, so too does the organization of this instrumental complex. And this centre, once again, is my body: unlike the instruments within the field, ‘[w]e do not use this instrument, for we are it’ (BN 324). ‘[T]he body is present in every action although invisible, for the act reveals the hammer and the nails, the brake and the change of speed, not the foot which brakes or the hand which hammers’ (BN 324). The body as being-for-others ‘The Other is originally given to me as a body in situation . . . the Other’s body is meaningful’ (BN 344). It is not perceived as a thing among things, ‘as if it were an isolated object having purely external relations with other thises . . . [It] is immediately given as the center of reference in a situation which is synthetically organized around it’ (BN 344). Sartre stresses the radical differences between this object and all others. Suppose that I see a man in a public park: If I were to think of him as being only a puppet, I should apply to him the categories which I ordinarily use to group temporal-spatial ‘things’ . . . Perceiving him as a man, on the other hand . . . is to register an organization without distance of the things in my universe around that privileged object. To be sure, the lawn remains two yards and twenty inches away from him, but . . . [i]nstead of the two terms of the distance being indifferent, interchangeable, and in a reciprocal relation, the distance is unfolded starting from the man whom I see and extending up to the lawn . . . instead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me. (BN 254) Although the Other is here an ‘object’ in virtue of the fact that I am looking at him and not vice versa, he is perceived as a situated object around whom the world is organized: his body is seen as a centre of his own fields of perception and action, and the space he inhabits is a life-space. Moreover, it follows that the perception of the Other’s body ‘can not by nature be of the same type as that of inanimate objects . . . [His] conduct is originally released to perception as understandable’ (BN 347). Hence, the phenomena erroneously called the phenomena of expression, by no means indicate to us a hidden affection lived by some psychism . . . These frowns, this redness, this slight trembling . . . these do not express anger; they are the anger . . . In itself a clenched fist is nothing and means


7

nothing. But also we never perceive a clenched fist. We perceive a man who in a certain situation clenches his fist. (BN 346–7) The body lived as known by the other (sometimes called the body-for-itself-for-others) Sartre has a lengthy description of this dimension in an earlier chapter, focusing on shame, where it functions to illuminate our certainty of the Other’s existence and the meaning of being looked-at. His description in the chapter on the body focuses on the lived bodily experience of being looked at and contains this remarkable description of shyness: To ‘feel oneself blushing’, to ‘feel oneself sweating’, etc., are inaccurate descriptions which the shy person uses to describe his state; what he really means is that he is vividly and constantly conscious of his body not as it is for him but as it is for the Other . . . I seek to reach it [my body-for-others], to master it . . . in order to give it the form and the attitude which are appropriate. But it is on principle out of reach . . . Thus I forever act ‘blindly’, shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of my shooting. This is why the effort of the shy man after he has recognized the uselessness of these attempts will be to suppress his body-for-the-Other . . . he longs ‘not to have a body anymore’, to be ‘invisible’. (BN 353) The psychic body and affectivity Sartre recognizes that the body opens consciousness to being affected. His treatment of affectivity includes a discussion of pain, which he goes on to distinguish first from illness and then from disease. Pain, he argues, is in the first instance ‘indicated by the objects of the world’; if ‘my eyes hurt’ and I am reading, ‘[i]t is with more difficulty that the words are detached from the undifferentiated ground which they constitute; they may tremble, quiver; their meaning may be derived only with effort’ (BN 332). What makes this pain pain in the eyes? Not some kind of ‘local sign’ or other ‘criterion’; it would be better to say that my eyes are the pain: ‘Pain is precisely the eyes in so far as consciousness “exists them” ’ (BN 332; cf. BN 355); and this ‘vision-as-pain’ ‘is not distinguished’ from the trembling and quivering of the words (BN 332–3). I may then reflect on my consciousness-as-painful-vision; reflection ‘tends to make of pain something psychic’, what Sartre refers to as a ‘psychic object’, and the psychic object in this case is illness (BN 335). This illness ‘has its own duration’; it possesses ‘melodic qualities’, it ebbs and flows, but ‘the brief respites are a part of the illness just as silences are a part of a melody’ (BN 335–6).14 ‘There is an animism of illness; it is given as a living thing which has its form, its own duration, its habits. The sick maintain a sort of intimacy with it’ (BN 336).15

8

Katherine J. Morris

It can moreover be evaluated – one can hate it, endure it with patience, even ‘rejoice in it (if it foretells a release, a cure)’ (BN 337). Illness reveals ‘my body on a new plane of existence . . . a psychic body’ (BN 337), ‘a sort of implicit space supporting the melodic duration of the psychic’ (BN 338). Sartre goes on to distinguish between illness and disease. Whereas ‘pain “in the stomach” is the stomach itself as painfully lived’, and the illness is ‘in the stomach’ only in the sense that ‘this suffered figure’ is ‘raised on the ground of the body-existed’ (BN 355), the Other, through language, allows me to ‘name’ the stomach , to ‘know that it has the shape of a bagpipe, that it is a sack, that it produces juices, and enzymes’, and that this sack has an ulcer, which I can imagine ‘as a redness, a slight internal putrescence’ (BN 356). ‘At this point a new layer of existence appears . . . the Disease’, which is ‘objectively discernable for Others’. The body, here the ‘injured stomach’, is ‘the substance of the disease, that which is destroyed by the disease’ (BN 356). The aberrant type of appearance Sartre acknowledges that my own body can be something which I myself perceive or use as I would an instrument. I can ‘see my hands, touch my back, smell the odor of my sweat’ (cf. BN 304). I can also utilize parts of my body as tools, for instance, I can use my hand just as I would a hammer, ‘for example, when I hold an almond or walnut in my left fist and then pound it with my right hand’ (BN 357). This aspect of the body he plays down: ‘We must realize that this possibility of seeing our body is a pure factual given, absolutely contingent’, so that ‘[s]cholars who have made this appearance serve as a basis for a general theory of the body . . . have shown themselves up as understanding nothing about the question’ (BN 358). Sexual desire and flesh (BN III.3.i) Sartre offers a lengthy and celebrated discussion of sexual desire, which he defines as ‘[m]y original attempt to get hold of the Other’s free subjectivity through his objectivity-for-me’ (BN 382). Sexuality is not, he argues, merely a ‘contingent accident bound to our physiological nature’, but ‘a necessary structure of being-for-itself-for-others’ (BN 384). Desire is sometimes compared to hunger or thirst; like hunger, sexual desire has physiological manifestations. But whereas ‘hunger is a pure surpassing of corporeal facticity’ – ‘the For-itself flees it toward its possibles; that is, toward a certain state of satisfied-hunger’ (BN 387) – sexual desire ‘compromises me’: ‘one ceases to flee’ this corporeal facticity, ‘one slides toward a passive consent to the desire’. Thus ‘desire is not only the revelation of the Other’s body but the revelation of my own body’ (BN 388). The expression of sexual desire – an expression which Sartre compares to the expression of thought by language – is the caress: ‘in caressing the Other


9

I cause his flesh to be born beneath my caress, under my fingers . . . [I] incarnate the Other’ (BN 390). ‘I make her enjoy my flesh through her flesh in order to compel her to feel herself flesh’ in a ‘double reciprocal incarnation’ (BN 391). Indeed, in sexual desire the whole world is transformed, and the relation of my body to the world: no longer is my body the unutilizable centre of a field of objects to be utilized. ‘A contact with them is a caress . . . In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects . . . the warmth of air, the breath of the wind, the rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way, as . . . revealing my flesh by means of their flesh’ (BN 392). Collective techniques In his chapter on freedom, Sartre spotlights what he calls ‘collective techniques’ which ‘determine my belonging to collectivities’. Such collectivities include the human race – ‘[b]elonging to the human race is defined by the use of very elementary and very general techniques: to know how to walk, to know how to take hold . . . ’ (BN 512) – but also smaller collectivities which dictate the precise ways in which I walk, grasp things and the like: ‘to be a Savoyard is not simply to inhabit the high valleys of Savoy; it is, among a thousand other things, to ski in the winters, to use the ski as a mode of transportation. And precisely, it is to ski according to the French method, not that of Arlberg or of Norway’ (BN 513). Thus, without explicitly thematizing it, he acknowledges that there are socially induced ways of moving the body. This description of the body is immensely rich, and there are other sections that enrich it yet further; it is at the same time not without its unclarities, lacunae and difficulties. The contributions to this collection reflect all of these aspects. Rather than summarizing each contribution individually, I shall develop Sartre’s description of the body in dialogue with the contributors under three headings: context and clarification, critical engagement and continuing the conversation. The volume itself is divided into these three main parts, although most of the contributions could be included in more than one of them.

Context and clarification The description of the body in the context of BN Joseph Catalano sees Sartre’s ontology as centring on the coming into being of the world through the human body, and claims that the chapter on the body is the pivotal one. However, as Catalano observes, if you do not finish the book you can be misled into thinking that consciousness is disembodied. The explanation, Catalano argues, lies in the importance Sartre places on ‘order’ (see also Moran in this volume), for instance: ‘it is necessary to establish an order of our reflections which conforms to the order of being’ (BN 305).16 Given that the body is first of all the unperceived centre

10

Katherine J. Morris

of the perceptive-cum-active field, we cannot begin our phenomenological reflections with it. Sartre’s predecessors Of course, no thinker operates in a vacuum, Sartre (1905–80) included. It is not Sartre’s style systematically to record all his intellectual debts or even to name all his targets; there are virtually no author’s footnotes in the entire book. The French educational system allows Sartre to presume at least tangential acquaintance on the part of his intended readership with most of the figures he cites. Anglo-American readers will of course be familiar with Descartes and Hume, but they may find it useful to have a few words said about some of the other central figures in the history of thinking about the body and the life-world. Husserl and the Gestalt psychologists are perhaps the most obvious influences, though there are many others.17 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) Husserl, of course, was the founder of phenomenology. Like Descartes, he wanted philosophy to be absolutely certain; phenomenology was to be the name of this rigorous method of philosophizing. The basic tool of phenomenology was ‘intentional analysis’, which included ‘descriptions of the intentional object as such’ (‘noematic’ descriptions) and descriptions of ‘the modes of consciousness (for example: perception, recollection, retention)’: ‘noetic’ descriptions (Husserl 1960 §15). What seems to have gripped many of Husserl’s admirers, Sartre included, was the richness of his intentional analyses of these noemata and noeses (the former leading into his explorations of the ‘life-world’), and the terms of his descriptions (for example, ‘horizon’), which linked these descriptions to those of the Gestalt psychologists (see below). Husserl’s contributions to the phenomenology of the body, like Sartre’s, are too often neglected, and two essays in this volume in particular help to fill that lacuna. Dermot Moran draws our attention to Husserl’s discussion of the so-called ‘double sensation’ (when one hand touches the other), which is of interest because of the way in which, in this situation, the body seems to be both ‘subject’ and ‘object’; this example was picked up by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, although, as Moran shows, each analyses it importantly differently. This discussion forms part of Husserl’s exploration of the role of the five senses in building up our sense of the physical world, spatiality and our embodiment within the world; the sense of touch – an inescapably bodily sense – has been relatively neglected outside of the phenomenological tradition. Betsy Behnke outlines the background to Husserl’s phenomenology of the body, which puts into question the dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; she explores the phenomenology of the socially shaped body in connection with both Husserl and Sartre.


11

Gestalt psychology This school of psychology was developed in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, principally by three German psychologists, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer, although Kurt Lewin is also particularly important for Sartre. Thus its emergence paralleled that of Husserl’s phenomenology and was a response to the same ‘crisis’ as Husserl’s phenomenology.18 The Gestaltists set themselves against the atomistic, mechanistic and empiricist scientific psychology of their time; they are best known for their work on perception, although Lewin and others also studied emotion, social psychology and child psychology. Such Gestaltist concepts as ‘figure–ground’ and ‘field’ (as well as ‘gestalt’ itself, which Sartre often indicates by his peculiar term ‘a this’), and Lewin’s notion of ‘hodological space’, are discernible throughout BN. Lewin’s linked notion of ‘valences’ (Auffordungscharakters, translated literally by J. J. Gibson as ‘affordances’), even if not the term, plays a key role in Sartre’s conception of life-space. Adrian Mirvish, one of the contributors to this volume, has done more than any other commentator to highlight the influence of Gestalt psychology on Sartre’s thinking; he here uses Gestaltist concepts to make concrete, embodied and situated sense of certain Sartrean notions widely seen as abstract and incomprehensible: negation and non-positional self-awareness. Sartre’s contemporaries By far the most significant of Sartre’s contemporaries when it comes to thinking about the body are Sartre’s lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir and his friend and contemporary Maurice Merleau-Ponty.19 Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, now seen as one of the founding texts of feminism, may be regarded as developing the idea – one that Sartre acknowledged but which did not interest him as a philosopher – that different groups of human beings may live their bodies and the world differently. The title of this work indicates that women have, in most societies and in most periods of history, always been ‘the Other’, both objectified and disvalued; and Beauvoir explores both the myths by which this state of affairs has been ‘justified’, and the ways in which women live their own bodies and the world as a consequence. The intellectual relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir has been the subject of extensive and intense, often acrimonious, discussion. Given that they spent a very great deal of their adult lives in conversation, much of it about philosophy, it would be frankly unbelievable if there were no mutual influence. Commentators diverge rather sharply, however, on the precise contribution of each. At one extreme, as Murphy notes, ‘Sartre was considered the real philosopher and Beauvoir’s philosophy was allegedly

12

Katherine J. Morris

derivative of his’ (1999b: 1). Given feminist ‘corrective measures’ (ibid.), it is rare to find this extreme position expressed now; but there are examples of the opposite extreme (Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1994, 2008). There is a variety of more nuanced views in Murphy (1999a) and Daigle and Golomb (2009). Constance Mui’s essay (in this volume) is a notable example, and also serves the purpose of introducing the reader to the ‘Christian existentialist’ and philosopher of embodiment Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), to whose theory of embodiment Sartre’s ontology, claims Mui, gives its fullest and most salient expression. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) The relationship between Sartre and his friend and contemporary MerleauPonty has likewise been the subject of extensive discussion, and several essays in this volume engage with Merleau-Ponty (Catalano, Moran and Langer in particular). Merleau-Ponty’s best-known book, The Phenomenology of Perception, develops a phenomenological account of perception and the perceived world in deliberate contradistinction to both empiricism and intellectualism: an account that places the lived body at its centre. He is much more widely acknowledged than Sartre as a major contributor to the phenomenology of the body, and is also heavily critical of Sartre, tending to identify him as an intellectualist; many criticisms of Sartre made by others are inspired by Merleau-Ponty. The axis around which a good deal of the debate turns is the extent to which Merleau-Ponty misrepresented Sartre, and hence whether the differences between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are deep and genuine or simply a matter of emphasis and nuance. (See Whitford 1982 and Stewart ed. 1998.) Beauvoir, at least publicly, took the latter view and launched a spirited defence of Sartre under the title ‘Merleau-Ponty and pseudo-Sartreanism’ (reprinted in Stewart ed. 1998).20 Sartre’s successors Two of the most prominent contributors to theorizing the body were the philosopher-sociologist Bourdieu and the philosopher-historian Foucault, both a generation younger than Sartre.21 Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) Like Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu’s contributions to understanding the body (in such works as Outline of a Theory of Practice) form part of a critique of the empiricist and intellectualist theorists of his time (in Bourdieu’s case, principally sociologists and anthropologists rather than psychologists). Habitus, characterized by Bourdieu as ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations’ and as ‘history turned into nature’ (1977: 78), may be seen up to a point as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘habit-body’ (PP 82ff, 142ff, 152) made social, although it draws more explicitly on Merleau-Ponty’s earlier The


13

Structure of Behaviour. Bourdieu criticized Sartre for his refusal ‘to recognize anything resembling durable dispositions . . . [he] makes each action a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world’ (1977: 73), though he finds hints of a recognition of habitus in BN – ‘against the subjective intentions of its author’ (1977: 215 n. 18). Nick Crossley, in his contribution to this volume, in effect takes this up, noting passages in BN which seem to presuppose some notion of a relatively permanent socially induced disposition or habitus, and arguing that it would not have been inconsistent with Sartre’s emphasis on situated freedom for him fully to incorporate such a notion. Michel Foucault (1926–84) Foucault’s best-known contribution to body theory is the notion of the ‘docile body’, principally drawing on Discipline and Punish. Modern forms of power, Foucault argued, employ techniques (‘disciplines’) which make possible ‘the meticulous control of the operations of the body’ (1979: 137); such techniques on the one hand train their subjects, that is, inculcate new skills and capacities (holding and firing a gun, having good handwriting), and on the other bring those new skills and capacities ‘into a relation of strict subjection’ (1979: 138). The central mechanisms of disciplinary techniques are surveillance and the ‘normalizing judgement’, which become internalized: ‘he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power . . . he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (1979: 202–3). Thus is created the ‘docile body’, one ‘that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (1979: 136). Foucault was dismissive of phenomenology as an approach ‘which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity’ (1973: xiv). Yet many Sartre scholars have argued – sometimes self-consciously under the rubric ‘the new Sartre’ (Howells ed. 1992; Fox 2003; cf. P. S. Morris 1996) – not only that Sartre’s conception of the subject, even in BN, was far more ‘postmodern’ than Foucault acknowledged, but that Foucault’s theoretical apparatus draws heavily on Sartre: in particular that Foucault’s ‘normalizing judgements’ and ‘surveillance’ are grounded in Sartre’s discussion of the look and that his ‘docile body’ is an elaboration of Sartre’s third dimension of the body. (See Langer and Gordon in this volume for an enlargement of this argument.)

Critical engagement No one would claim that Sartre got everything right, and even where criticisms can be argued to be unfair, it may be contended that Sartre’s mode

14

Katherine J. Morris

of expression tends to invite misunderstanding. I here outline a handful of criticisms that are commonly made. The body-thing Xavier Monasterio (1980; see also Cassam in this volume) argues that our body (in addition to being a body-subject and an object for other subjects) is also a ‘thing among things’ (1980: 55): that Sartre misses out our ‘passivity to things’ (1980: 54). Yet Sartre does acknowledge that our bodies are ‘things among things’ when he speaks of the physician’s concern ‘with my body in the midst of the world’ (BN 303) and in connection with his ‘aberrant’ appearance of the body. Moreover, when he distinguishes between ‘the thing “leg” ’ and ‘the leg as the possibility which I am of walking, running, or of playing football’ (BN 304) he is not denying that human bodies are (also) things, he is simply making a distinction between the body in the midst of the world and the body as being-for-itself. This distinction is indeed one of the fundamental dualities which for Sartre defines human reality: ‘being-in-the-midst-of-the-world – i.e. . . . our inert presence as a passive object among other objects’ vs. our ‘being-in-the-world’ (BN 58). It is true none the less that Sartre does, at least in the chapter on the body, play down this aspect, although in his defence he is reacting against the philosophical tradition (which continues today) of recognizing nothing but this aspect of the body. Criticisms of Sartre’s subject/object exclusivity and exhaustivity Monasterio’s critique relies in part on a misreading of this passage: ‘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’ (BN 304). Monasterio comments, ‘Needless to say, confronted with such a dilemma, Sartre chooses the body-subject and conveniently forgets the body-thing’ (1980: 61; cf. Cassam in this volume and, more remotely, Dillon 1974). Sartre’s claim, however, is not that the body ‘is not’ a body-thing – this ‘is’ an aspect of the body – but that it cannot ‘be’ a body-thing and a body-subject simultaneously. One might here use the analogy of an ambiguous picture: there is a tolerably clear sense in which the picture ‘is’ both of a vase and of two profiles, but there is equally a tolerably clear sense in which it cannot ‘be’ both at the same time (cf. K. J. Morris 2008: 102). Alternatively, following Moran’s comparison (in this volume) between the confusion of these ‘two essentially different orders of reality’ (BN 304) and a Rylean category mistake, we might suggest that to say that ‘the body is both a thing among other things and that by which things are revealed to me’ would be odd in a way comparable to the oddity of saying that ‘She came both in a vale of tears and a sedan chair’. The so-called ‘double sensation’ – a label Sartre resists precisely because it seems to commit the very ‘category mistake’ in question – is an instance of


15

what Sartre calls the ‘aberrant’ experience of the body and is the focus of Moran’s contribution.22 One might, however, wonder whether the ‘subject/object’ dichotomy is exhaustive. Sartre tends to use the word ‘object’ promiscuously, despite the fact that he wants to make important distinctions. For instance, the ‘other-as-object’ – that is, the body of the other – is no ‘mere thing’ but a ‘transcendence’ (a ‘transcendence-transcended’, to be sure, but still a transcendence): the centre of his own perceptive-cum-instrumental field; Sartre’s use of the word ‘object’ here thus obscures his own distinction between the body of the other as a situated ‘psychic’ object and the body-thing (the body as being-in-the-midst-of-the-world). Moreover, the subject/object distinction or the related lived/known distinction has been argued to exclude an area of experience in between: Kathleen V. Wider (1997) attributes to the alleged exhaustivity of this dichotomy the difficulties that Sartre has with describing pure reflection; Michael Gillan Peckitt (in this volume) argues that even by Sartre’s own lights, the experiences of pain and illness do not fit comfortably into this dichotomy; and Betsy Behnke (also in this volume) wants to open up a space in this same area for the sort of ‘lucidly lived awareness’ that is not objectifying but allows me to take a greater degree of ‘kinaesthetic self-responsibility’. The ‘affective body’ Monasterio also claims that Sartre misses out the ‘affective body’: whereas both my body and the table may be dented by some instrument, my body, but not the table, is ‘affected’ by this change. Thus the body is not only an ‘object of passivity’ (the earlier point) but also a ‘subject of passivity’ (1980: 57). Monasterio does take note of Sartre’s discussion of pain, but finds it unsatisfactory: first, because ‘Sartre does not relate the affectivity of the body to our passivity to the world’, and secondly, because he ‘tends to interpret affectivity as a characteristic of a pure consciousness rather than of a body’ (1980: 57 n. 8). One might wish to defend Sartre against both of these charges, not least because Monasterio fails to recognize that, for Sartre, consciousness is its body (as well as not-being it): ‘I am my body to the extent that I am; I am not my body to the extent that I am not what I am’ (BN 326). Nonetheless, several contributors to this volume (Peckitt, Howells, P. S. Morris) have found Sartre’s treatment of pain, illness and disease troublesome and incomplete. Sartre’s negativity Sartre’s examples – shame, shyness, pain – may seem almost pathologically negative. His declaration that ‘[c]onflict is the original meaning of being-for-others’ (BN 364) is not simply outrageous, it is, it may be argued, outrageously false. Moreover, his descriptions of concrete relations with

16

Katherine J. Morris

others, from which his characterizations of sexual desire are drawn, present a seemingly relentlessly negative view of interpersonal relationships (tempered only by the ray of hope in a footnote, BN 412 n. 14, which indicates that these are bad faith relationships). Thus sexual desire – ‘[m]y original attempt to get hold of the Other’s free subjectivity through his objectivityfor-me’ (BN 382) – is ‘doomed to failure’ (BN 396), and this failure is ‘at the origin of sadism’ (BN 399). The title of Bob Solomon’s book Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts vividly captures this dominant impression. Yet, as Solomon’s contribution to this volume brings out, Sartre’s lyrical descriptions of sexual desire are part of a genuinely perceptive phenomenological description. Monika Langer argues, on the one hand, that that being ‘objectified’ need not be a negative experience (cf. P. S. Morris 1999) and, on the other, that there are aspects of Sartre’s negativity which capture important features of modernity. Again, Phyllis Sutton Morris’s contribution to this volume includes an exploration of both negative and positive lived body experiences in intersubjective touching.

Continuing the conversation For all of his shortcomings, Sartre has been and remains a stimulating intellectual companion, someone with whom many have engaged in productive dialogue. I highlight three such conversations which are represented in this volume. Embodiment Sartre clearly holds that it is necessary that consciousness exists as body (hence consciousness is necessarily embodied), yet contingent that it exists as this body rather than another. Yet it is also necessarily true that every human being belongs to a particular race, sex, age, class, ethnicity, culture, and so on (although each of these terms requires delicate treatment, as Sartre himself occasionally recognizes),23 and as such live their bodies and live the world differently. What Sartre does not generally do – what he does not see as his business as a phenomenologist to do – is to explore these differences.24 Moreover, although he is capable of beautifully detailed, complex and welldeveloped descriptions of aspects of human embodiment that are universal, as the passages on sexual desire demonstrate, he falls short when it comes to other universal aspects of human embodiment – notably, as Christina Howells’ contribution to this volume shows, death and dying. (Sartre’s discussion of death is curiously disembodied; he simply subsumes it under our beingfor-others, as that which gives others the opportunity to have the final say over who I am.) Yet it may be argued that Sartre’s ‘third dimension’ of the body – the body lived as known by the other – together with his highly developed conception of ‘bad faith’ give him the resources to describe oppressed embodiment


17

that many other theorists of the body, including Merleau-Ponty, lack. Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s lived experience in The Second Sex are grounded in these features of Sartre’s phenomenology, as are Sandra Lee Bartky’s well-known descriptions of ‘the phenomenology of oppression’ (1990), perhaps particularly her ‘Shame and gender’.25 Moreover, Sartre’s description of the Jew in an anti-Semitic society (1946) and his preface to an anthology of black and Malagasy poetry (‘Orphée Noir’/‘Black Orpheus’ 1949) laid the groundwork for a number of explorations of ways of being embodied in situations of oppression. Linda Bell (1999) offers a nuanced exploration of ‘different oppressions’ which begins from Anti-Semite and Jew. Lewis Ricardo Gordon’s classic description (1995) of the ‘black body’ in an anti-black world, despite being highly critical of certain assumptions in ‘Black Orpheus’, finds insights both there and in BN. (See also Gordon’s contribution to this volume.) Several contributions to this volume incorporate explorations of other non-universal ways of living the body; both Langer and Behnke investigate the body as it is lived in modern post-industrial society; K. J. Morris explores the lived body and the life-world of the clumsy person; Mui includes descriptions of both men’s and women’s ways of living their bodies; Peckitt tells us something about the lived body and the life-world of a chronic pain sufferer; Howells touches on the experience of an ageing body; and P. S. Morris and Langer both talk of the experience of serious illness. Sartre and modernity Several contributions to this volume argue that Sartre’s description of the body is peculiarly equipped to deal with aspects of what is often called ‘modernity’. Monika Langer, drawing as well on the historian of the body Barbara Duden, argues that Sartre’s characterization of interpersonal relations as objectifying goes hand in hand with an objectifying, utilizing attitude toward the world which characterizes modernity; she also invokes his later conceptions of the ‘practico-inert’ and ‘counter-finality’ to illuminate the threat of environmental catastrophe. The result is that Sartre is better equipped than Merleau-Ponty to describe the lived body and life-world of modernity. Nick Crossley picks up on Giddens’ notion of a ‘body project’ whereby, in modernity, the body has ceased to be an immutable background and has become something to be worked on, and over, subject to ceaseless modifications; he suggests that Sartre’s reflections on the process whereby individuals come to experience their bodies as objects, via the Other, could help us make sense of this. Betsy Behnke identifies what she labels the ‘startle response’, theorized in part through Sartre, as a central bodily attitude of modernity. The socially and culturally shaped body As Betsy Behnke (in this volume) notes, ‘Phenomenological approaches to embodied experience are sometimes criticized by those studying the social

18

Katherine J. Morris

construction of the body, who claim, for example, that phenomenological work not only focuses on atemporal “essences” at the expense of historical/cultural situatedness, but routinely assumes and privileges “private” experience and individual freedom while ignoring the very real inscription of the social in the corporeal’ (231). Nick Crossley (in this volume) identifies a parallel preconception about Sartre on the part of sociologists of the body. Behnke challenges the assumptions of the social constructionist critique by way of a Husserlian somatology (and interestingly, both Behnke and Langer envisage practical ways of reshaping the socially shaped body); Crossley defends Sartre against the sociologists’ dismissiveness. And Lewis R. Gordon’s essay in this volume explores the potential for a productive interchange between Sartre’s basic notion of ‘alienated embodiment’ and Fanon’s keen insistence on the significance of social and cultural reality for embodiment. It is to be hoped that readers of this volume will be inspired by these examples to continue the conversation yet further.

Notes 1. I am for these purposes counting Wittgenstein as a post-Kantian Continental philosopher. There has also been some recent attention to the pragmatists as body theorists (see especially Shusterman 2008). 2. Key texts in English-language sociology include Turner 1970 and Shilling 1993. Influential Continental sociologists include Mauss and Bourdieu. Crossley (one of the contributors to this volume) has worked extensively in this area, drawing on Mauss, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. 3. Also Blacking ed. 1977. Key anthropological body-theorists include Douglas (especially 1970) and Csordas (for example, 2002). 4. www.plato.stanford.edu. Its alphabetical list yields ‘body: see substance’. 5. Of course bodily movements are mentioned within action theory, but these are treated as the motions of a physiological object. See K. J. Morris 1988 and forthcoming. 6. Snowdon (1995) is an exception and is, I understand, beginning to exert an influence. 7. Often originating in research grants – a shibboleth of modern academia. 8. Betsy Behnke’s Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body is a very different, extra-institutional sort of project. She is one of the contributors to this volume. 9. Gibson was himself influenced by the Gestalt psychologists who were a major influence on Sartre. 10. Cassam’s contribution to this volume falls into this category. I take some small credit for the insertion of Sartre into this mini-tradition, since Evans briefly supervised my doctoral thesis. Since post-Kantian Continental philosophy has been critical both of empiricism and the sort of intellectualism exemplified by Kant, and since many aspects of Kant with which the phenomenologists take issue are not criticized by post-Kantian Anglo-American philosophers, it may be expected that the phenomenologists would find things to criticize in this Anglo-American approach.


19

11. See his 1935 lecture ‘Philosophy and the crisis of European man’; this lecture formed the basis of part of his great later unfinished work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. 12. Sacks’ Awakenings, made into a major film starring Robert de Niro, is even cited as a formative influence by the great sociologist of the body Bryan Turner (1984: 6). Some Anglo-American philosophers also cite, for example, Cole and Paillard 1995; see also Gallagher and Cole 1998. 13. Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on the body includes extensive analyses of a braininjured war veteran called Schneider, described by Gelb and Goldstein, whose peculiarities recall those of some of Sacks’ patients. Schilder 1923 (also cited by Merleau-Ponty) contains a wealth of experimental data regarding the so-called body-image available to the French phenomenologists; the English translation appeared in 1950 but did not enter the public consciousness as forcefully as Sacks. 14. The notions of ‘psychic objects’ revealed by impure or accessory reflection, and of their ‘melodic qualities’, are developed in some detail in Sartre 1957. 15. The intimation of ‘magic’ is a recurrent theme in Sartre, most obviously in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions but also, as here, visible in BN. Sartre was well acquainted with the anthropology of his day; Lewis R. Gordon (in his contribution to this volume) discusses Sartre’s interchanges with Claude Lévi-Strauss and thematizes the notion of ‘magic’. 16. Sartre’s reference to the necessity of ‘observing strict order’ clearly harks back to Descartes, and the misunderstandings Catalano refers to can be compared to the idea that Descartes was a sceptic based on having only read the first Meditation. 17. Moran (in this volume) gives helpful introductions in his endnotes to a good number of other body theorists who influenced Sartre. In this volume, see also Michael Gillan Peckitt on Maine de Biran, Katherine J. Morris on Henri Bergson, and Nick Crossley on the sociologist Marcel Mauss. 18. See Ash’s (1998) excellent history of Gestalt psychology. 19. Lewis R. Gordon in this volume also considers Sartre’s relationship with Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist who had been sent to Algeria to fight on the side of the French, but who joined the rebels. 20. Some of those who see Beauvoir as at least an equal partner in the Sartre/Beauvoir relationship argue that the version of Sartre attacked by Merleau-Ponty was the true Sartre, and that those elements in his writing that sound more MerleauPontyan are those where Beauvoir had succeeded in persuading him to modify his views. 21. Both were also trained by Georges Canguilhem, who merits more discussion here than I am able to offer. Michael Gillan Peckitt’s contribution to this volume also engages with the phenomenologist Michel Henry (1922–2002). 22. It might, however, be argued that the label ‘aberrant’ feeds into a dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, presupposed by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, which some have seen as problematic (Shusterman 2008, K. J. Morris in this volume). 23. For instance, on sex, see BN 382ff. 24. In Heideggerean terms (picked up by Mui in this volume), Sartre sees phenomenology’s task as ontological and takes it that explorations of different ways of being embodied would be merely ontic. An important and contentious issue is the extent to which different ways of living the body can be seen as ontological (again, see Mui in this volume).

20

Katherine J. Morris

25. Iris Marion Young’s descriptions of ‘throwing like a girl’, ‘pregnant embodiment’ and ‘breasted experience’ (all in Young 1990) are also classics, though less clearly traceable to the influence of Sartre.

References Ash, M. G. (1998). Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York and London: Routledge. Bell, L. A. (1999). ‘Different oppressions: a feminist exploration of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew’. In Murphy, ed., 123–48. Bermúdez, J. L., Marcel, A. and Eilan, N., eds. (1995). The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Blacking, J., ed. (1977). The Anthropology of the Body. London: Academic Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Tr. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original French: Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, 1972.) Campbell, J. (1995). Past, Space and Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cole, J. and Paillard, J. (1995). ‘Living without touch and peripheral information about body position and movement: studies with deafferented subjects’. In Bermúdez et al., eds., 245–66. Csordas, T. (2002). Body/Meaning/Healing. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Daigle, C. and Golomb, J., eds. (2009). Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence, Indianapolis and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Dillon, M. C. (1974). ‘Sartre on the phenomenal body and Merleau-Ponty’s critique’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5: 144–58. Reprinted in Stewart, ed. (1998). Douglas, M. (1970). Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Random House. Eilan, N. McCarthy, R. and Brewer, B., eds. (1993). Spatial Representation Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Ed. J. McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fox, N. F. (2003). The New Sartre. London and New York: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. (Original French: Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975.) Fullbrook, E. and K. (1994). Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend. New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins. Fullbrook, E. and K. (2008). Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre. London and New York: Continuum. Gallagher, S. and Cole, J. (1998). ‘Body image and body schema in a deafferented subject’. In Welton, ed. Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


21

Gelb, A. and K. Goldstein (1920). Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle. Leipzig: Barth. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Howells, C., ed. (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. Tr. D. Cairns. Dordrecht, Boston, MA and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original German, 1929.) Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lock, M. and Farquhar, J., eds. (2007). Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Malacrida, C. and Low, J., eds. (2007). Sociology of the Body: A Reader. Ontario: Oxford University Press. Matthews, E. (2007). Body-Subjects and Disordered Minds: Treating the Whole Person in Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry Series). Mauss, M. (1935). ‘Les techniques du corps’. Journal de Psychologie Normal et Pathologique, 271–93; rpt. in his Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (1950, rpt. 1968), 363–86; translated as ‘Techniques of the Body’. Tr. Ben Brewster. Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88. Rpt. (1979): ‘Body techniques’, in Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 95–123, also (2007) in Malacrida and Low, eds. Monasterio, X. (1980). ‘The body in Being and Nothingness’. In Silverman and Elliston, eds. Morris, K. J. (1988). ‘Actions and the body: Hornsby vs. Sartre’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68, 3: 473–88. Morris, K. J. (2008). Sartre. Oxford: Blackwell (Great Minds Series). Morris, K. J. (forthcoming). ‘Sartre on action’. In T. O’Connor and C. Sandis, eds., Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action. Morris, P. S. (1996). ‘Self-creating selves: Sartre and Foucault’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, 4. Morris, P. S. (1999). ‘Sartre on objectification: a feminist perspective.’ In Murphy, ed. Murphy, J. S., ed. (1999a). Feminist Interpretations of Sartre. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Murphy, J. S. (1999b) ‘Introduction’ to Murphy, ed. Orbach, S. (2009). Bodies. London: Profile Books. Proudfoot, M. (2003). The Philosophy of Body. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, O. (1982). Awakenings (revised edition). London: Pan/Picador. Sacks, O. (1985). The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Sacks, O. (1990). A Leg to Stand On. New York: Harper/Perennial. Sartre, J-P. (1946). Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Gallimard. (English translation: Anti-Semite and Jew. Tr. G. J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.) Sartre, J-P. (1949). ‘Orphée noir’. Preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. Compiled by L. Senghor. Paris: PUF. (English tr. ‘Black Orpheus’ rpt. in R. Bernasconi, ed. Race, 115–42. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.) Sartre, J-P. (1939). Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions. Paris: Hermann. (English translation: Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Tr. P. Mairet. London: Methuen, 1962.) Schilder, P. (1923). Das Körperschema. Berlin: Springer. (English translation: The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. Science Editions, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1950.)

22

Katherine J. Morris

Shilling, C. (1993). The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Shusterman, R. (2006). ‘A body of knowledge’. The Philosophers’ Magazine, 4th Quarter: 18–24. Shusterman, R. (2008). Body Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, H. J. and Elliston, F.A., eds. (1980). Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to his Philosophy. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Snowdon, P. (1995). ‘Persons, animals and bodies’. In Bermúdez et al., eds., 71–86. Solomon, R. C. (2006). Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Sartre and Camus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spicker, S., ed. (1970). The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Stanghellini, G. (2004). Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry Series). Stewart, J. (1998). The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Turner, B. S. (1970). The Body and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Roach, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Welton, D., ed. (1998). Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Welton, D., ed. (1999). The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Blackwell. Whitford, M. (1982). Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre’s Philosophy. Lexington, KY: French Forum. Wider, K. V. (1997). The Bodily Nature of Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indianapolis and Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press.

Part I Context and Clarification

This page intentionally left blank

1 The Body and the Book: Reading Being and Nothingness Joseph S. Catalano

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty reminds us of the words of Edmund Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink, that phenomenology is wonder in the face of the world and a corresponding return to things (PP xiii). Still, Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty wrote about phenomenology, and certainly we come across their thoughts only in books. On one level I do not want to make very much of this; that is, I do not claim that the philosophical enterprise can be reduced to the act of writing. There is no need for me to take such a heavy burden upon myself since my point is a simple hermeneutical one, namely, that certain books have a unity that is more than the sum of their chapters. If this observation is not obvious, it is because the purpose of writing philosophy, like the purpose of writing history, is usually to impart information that leads to a certain insight about reality, and, in this respect, the goal of the writing is clarity of expression. Writing with verve and color may increase our enjoyment, but the written word suited to philosophy seems to be the simple expository one of the type that we find exemplified in good encyclopedia articles. Nevertheless, as Merleau-Ponty would say, neither reality nor history fall into neat divisions. There is more than one corpus of philosophical writings that fit into neither a literary nor a usual expository genre. The Platonic dialogues, the majority of the works of Nietzsche and of Kierkegaard, as well as the dialectic in all its forms – each have a non-expository aspect to their written form. To be more precise, as I am using the term ‘expository’, its main characteristic is that the author writes not only as an expert in a field but from the perspective of an expert. He or she informs us rather than leads us to see the matter for ourselves. This is not quite right either because in good expository writing arguments and examples are given, and, from that perspective, the writer does help us to grasp the point being discussed. Perhaps, it is best to formulate the difference between the usual philosophical expository writing as initiated by Aristotle and the kind that we get in the Platonic dialogues negatively. There is a sense in which Plato keeps us in the 25

26

Joseph S. Catalano

dark about his own conclusions in a way that Aristotle does not. Further, this difference is not merely one of a writing technique; it is an aspect of the philosophies themselves. Still, one might object that a phenomenological procedure attempts to describe phenomena without the constraints of a priori criteria, and to this extent, it would seem appropriate that the act of writing not be itself burdened with a particular methodology. On the other hand, one can legitimately question whether this is possible; even the attitude that phenomenology should be written in a series of loosely connected descriptive tracts is itself a constraint on the act of writing, a constraint that, if followed through, would lead to the analytical requirement that philosophical reflection never be on the whole of reality. Indeed, this restraint would rule out Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which has its own distinctive unity. Whether these introductory remarks are helpful or not, my point is that Merleau-Ponty presents his thought in Phenomenology of Perception differently than does Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Compared to MerleauPonty’s phenomenological study, Sartre’s work keeps us in the dark about what is happening in the book until we reach the pivotal chapter on the body. More importantly, in both cases the writing techniques are related to the philosophies being expounded. This difference in the ways the writing is wedded to the philosophy explains to some extent why MerleauPonty’s work is generally not misread in the way that is true of Sartre’s book. Indeed, any comparison between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty encounters the embarrassment of the dual Sartrean canons, a fact that does not exist with Merleau-Ponty’s work. The situation is further confusing because some Sartreans tend to concede Being and Nothingness to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of it. I will attempt to show that this is a mistake, that it misses the crucial role of the body in Sartre’s philosophy, and, consequently, the dialogue between the two thinkers is never placed on the proper level. Specifically, there are two fundamentally diverse readings of Sartre’s major text on ontology, one that reads it as espousing a quasi-Cartesianism that is precariously close to what Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception identifies as the intellectualist view of the self and the world, and the other which views Being and Nothingness basically as a dialogue with Heidegger’s Being and Time, a dialogue in which Sartre accepts the fundamental Heideggerian critique of panoramic consciousness and all traditional dualisms. I accept this second reading. It was my first reading of the text, and, as Merleau-Ponty says, we perhaps never get beyond our first reading. More importantly, even after twenty-five years of reflection, I think that it is the right reading. Also, it gives us a richer Sartre and makes the subsequent works themselves more interesting.1 In this expository essay, I want to first compare the way the writing in both books reflects the philosophies expressed in them. Secondly, I will then

The Body and the Book 27

proceed to a fuller discussion of the unique way the body functions both as a chapter in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and in the philosophy expressed in this book.

Reading Phenomenology of Perception Phenomenology of Perception is reader-friendly. It is almost impossible to misread the work. This does not mean that the work is easy or that it cannot be interpreted differently. Rather, the discourse is direct in the sense that, as a good teacher, Merleau-Ponty lets us know immediately where he stands, and he continues to inform us about the overall perspective on his philosophy. True, one must become acquainted with the way Merleau-Ponty continually frames his own thoughts between positions that he considers extremes, without explicitly warning us in advance that the early views merely introduce his own thought. But one soon becomes accustomed to this casual dialectic, and, regardless of questions we might have about Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the work as a whole is so well written that it is almost impossible to misread. What prevents a major misunderstanding is the way each chapter is the whole of the book, from one particular perspective. The book is fairly large, and if you do not finish the work, you will, of course, have an incomplete understanding of the book and of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but not a gross misinterpretation. This written methodology fits Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, a philosophy which invites us to witness our connections within the world and among other people, not as disinterested observers but as coming from a network of interrelations and reciprocities. In one sense it does not matter where you begin the book, you will be brought back to the whole. Of course, this is an oversimplification. The chapters of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology do unfold with an inner logic. For example, like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty explains why he introduces the formal discussion of the body with ‘psychological considerations’ (PP 63). Then, too, it seems to me that there is a gradual building to the last two chapters of part 2, ‘The Thing and the Natural World’ and ‘Other People and the Human World’. Also, by saving the discussions of the cogito, temporality and freedom for the last section, Merleau-Ponty is not only reversing what he sees to be the Heideggerian and Sartrean orders of being and discussion, but he is indirectly telling us what he thinks of the cogito, temporality and freedom, namely, that they have already been considered as aspects of the web of relations that is our involvement in the world and among others. Phenomenology of Perception is partly an attempt to answer Being and Nothingness, just as Sartre’s own work seems to be a reply to Heidegger’s Being and Time. That is, the encounter is not merely of a philosophy with a philosophy but with a book to a book. My reservation about the success of MerleauPonty’s work has nothing to do with my opinion about his philosophy.

28

Joseph S. Catalano

I will come to that. Rather, I am concerned with the inner dialogue with Sartre. Whether Merleau-Ponty has misread Sartre is, on one level, irrelevant for his own project. There is a sense in which every philosopher since Aristotle simplifies his or her predecessors in order to make a point. To the degree that the simplification gets to the heart of the earlier thought, we can have no quarrel with the thinker. But Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Sartre is of a different order. One of the problems is that, except for the last chapter on freedom, Merleau-Ponty seldom mentions Being and Nothingness. His objections against the intellectualist position in which the perceptions of the world become states of consciousness, as well as those against the scientific conception of the body as an object among other objects, and his arguments opposed to an absolute consciousness that constitutes the world, do not explicitly mention Sartre until we get to the last chapter, ‘Freedom’. Still, the earlier discussions must, indirectly at least, be against Sartre, or the last chapter would have no roots. But this is the problem. Merleau-Ponty has made his case against Sartre before he formally discusses him, and by the time we get to the last chapter on freedom ‘the chips are down’. The relation between the two books is complex, and I am not prepared to deal with all the aspects. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a fundamental disagreement between the two thinkers, and at times Merleau-Ponty touches on this difference. The main difference between their philosophies does indeed concern our constituting of the world, and, in a more general way, it concerns the prime phenomenological issue of the advent of the human reality within being. But, since Merleau-Ponty insists on viewing the constituting consciousness as some intellectual force, he misses Sartre’s basic point about the body’s constituting of the world. For example, to anticipate my discussion, it is clear that Sartre holds to neither an intellectualist nor an empiricist view of sensation. Sensation is, for Sartre, primarily a mode of the body’s being-in-the world, a mode that opens these doors into reality rather than others, for example, the door into color. By reducing this selectivity to an intellectualist position, Merleau-Ponty is able to dismiss it with the neat objection that all constituting makes the object constituted lucid, and thus all depth, surdness and mystery of the world is removed. But if the relation of consciousness to the world is that of matter to matter, that is, the matter of an active and organic consciousness delineating its world, then MerleauPonty’s objections are not to the point, or, at least, they are not to the point in the way he is making them.

Reading Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness is not reader-friendly. Sartre does not wish to mislead us, but he does require that we read the book as a whole, and that we follow his attempt to disclose how we pass through our body in our engaged


activities. In this sense, the chapters cannot be separated from the whole. What distracts from the book’s overall rigorous unity is the mixture of stylistically striking language and abundant use of commonplace examples that are relatively easy to read with a rigorous phenomenological procedure. For example, one could fill a dozen anthologies with articles dealing with the examples of the waiter and flirt in the chapter on bad faith and on the notion of bad faith itself, and I suspect that the majority would have little to do with the main thrust of Sartre’s argument, which is to show that the negation which distinguishes one thing from another arises from the lack of identity of the self with its selfhood as this is evident in our bad faith attitudes toward ourselves. That is, the chapter ‘Bad Faith’ is not a tract on bad faith as such, but a progression in a reflection that is, for the most part, of one piece. The distinctive unity of Being and Nothingness, a unity that reveals the unique role of the body in Sartre’s book and in his thought, comes about both through his use of language and the organization of his chapters. I will first briefly consider his use of language and then proceed to the organization of the chapters. To repeat, in both instances, I am concerned not merely with the structure of Sartre’s book but with the philosophy expressed in the sentences and chapters. Unlike his monographs, his essays and his interviews, Sartre’s major philosophical writings, Being and Nothingness, Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot, each distinctly unite writing with the philosophy expressed. Sartre’s language begins as a contextualism in Being and Nothingness, and it emerges as an explicit but very distinct nominalism in Critique of Dialectical Reason that is more fully developed in The Family Idiot. I have discussed aspects of Sartre’s unique nominalism elsewhere, and here I will limit myself to the contextualism of Being and Nothingness.2 Sartre’s contextualism arises from two methodological procedures. First, Sartre’s arguments and examples are directed only to the issue at hand. An author will frequently adopt this procedure ad hoc. For example, a writer may say that a stronger proposition might be true, but, for the present purposes, the weaker one will make the point. Sartre’s argumentation, however, consistently and ruthlessly aims at establishing only the minimum that is needed to make the particular point at hand. This method is in direct opposition to Merleau-Ponty’s own writing and amounts to more than the claim that one cannot write about everything at once. Sartre’s writing in Being and Nothingness implies the gamble that the reader will be extremely attentive to the issue being discussed and ‘bracket’ any other issues until the proper place for its discussion. The result is that the chapters of Being and Nothingness do not function as the chapters of Phenomenology of Perception. For example, the description of questioning the world, as given in the first chapter of the book, ‘On the Origin of Negation’, seems not to arise from a body. If you do not finish the book, if you do

30

Joseph S. Catalano

not get to the chapter on the body, you can be misled, although, if you read carefully, Sartre’s numerous examples would remind you that he is implicitly discussing the body. Part of the result of using words in such a way that the main discussion is limited only to the issue at hand is that terms such as ‘for-itself’, ‘in-itself’, ‘consciousness’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘alienation’ become contextual. None of these terms have a univocal meaning, although they do have contextual similarity. For example, there is no in-itself in the sense that we ever come across a pure in-itself that is not already modified by the for-itself. The initself is neither the Parmenidian One nor the Kantian thing-in-itself. Rather, in each instance, the in-itself points to the contribution of being to thinghood and the for-itself to the contribution of the conscious organic body. But this formulation, as Sartre himself warns us, can be misleading. The foritself does not contribute anything to thinghood; it merely delineates and highlights this rather than that. The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being; that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree, that landscape – being and nothing else. I want to grasp this being and I no longer find anything but myself. (BN 218) Thus, on the primary ontological level, the in-itself is the fact that the being of phenomena is not reducible to the whatness of phenomena; for example, the being of yellow is not the whatness of yellow. Because of this, yellow will always have a depth and a mystery that is not reducible to our perception of it. Still, the world would not be differentiated into colored things without sight. When Merleau-Ponty claims that he has escaped the dilemma of the for-itself and in-itself, the dilemma is largely invented, although in the concluding remarks I will consider their divergent views on passivity.3 I interpret the anthropocentrism of Being and Nothingness to be the claim that we have the world that we have because we have the body that we have. A star is a very human thing and consciousness is a very material thing. In Being and Nothingness, however, Sartre does not aim at preaching these anthropocentric conclusions to us; his purpose is to lead us to recognize the interdependence between consciousness and the world. This interdependence reveals that the world exists independently of our concepts about it, but not independently of the advent of human consciousness within matter. This interdependence between bodily consciousness and the world is real, although it is not a reciprocal relation. Here we touch upon a real difference between the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but I want to temporarily postpone this discussion until the conclusion.


The organization of the chapters also reflects the way Sartre’s book unites writing with phenomenological reflection. As a book, Being and Nothingness moves from the abstract to the concrete whole in such a way that the whole is always present, even if it is not being examined. This methodology and use of written language keeps the background as it were bracketed until the general nature of the question and the questioner have been examined in the introductory chapters. Thus in chapter 1 of part 1, ‘The Problem of Nothingness’, Sartre’s major point is to begin the destruction of a philosophy of presence by showing that the possibility of questioning things can arise only by an entity that is itself not a thing. To the extent that I ask, ‘Is it raining?’ I pass through the very body that makes this question possible, and I am conscious only of the question and the possibility of its answer. The world and the background of interpersonal relations exist, but the immediacy of the experience is just that of the concrete question and the possibility of an answer. Being and Nothingness is an attempt to rework the phenomenological method so that the act of writing becomes formally identified with the kind of reflection that reveals what is most basic to being and also what is first known. Sartre reverses the usual Aristotelian expository mode that leads us to understand the most basic issues from what is more easily understood. Sartre thus weds the philosophical method to the act of writing in such a way that the reader is led to make the philosophical ‘reduction’ and ‘destruction’ in a personal way. In order not to interfere with the reflection itself, the reader is not informed about what is happening until that place where methodology and content naturally meet, that is, two-thirds into Being and Nothingness, where Sartre finally moves the human body out of the background and into thetic awareness, and we are asked to become explicitly conscious of the bodily nature of all knowledge and all consciousness. Sartre writes: ‘But what is important above all else, in ontology as elsewhere, is to observe strict order in discussion’ (BN 218). And ‘it is most important to choose the order of our bits of knowledge’ (BN 303). Finally, ‘If we wish to reflect on the nature of the body, it is necessary to establish an order of reflection which conforms to the order of being’ (BN 305). This ordering of bits of knowledge is the written attempt to establish an order of reflection that corresponds to the order of being; that is, it is a new use of the phenomenological method that attempts to reveal the human body not as an object among other objects, but as the condition for knowing natural kinds. The condition itself remains in the background; that is, although a question and stance about the world arise from our body, they do not arise from our body as known. In our engaged activities, we pass through our bodies, and thus neither the body nor sensation appears until the world itself is shown to be human and until we realize that all our questions about being are human ones.

32

Joseph S. Catalano

The body and the book The general task of the language of Being and Nothingness is to gradually reintroduce the lived horizon into thetic consciousness in such a way that natural kinds and interpersonal relations emerge not as fixed by some panoramic consciousness, but as related to the fact that reality is impregnated by organic consciousness. Since my purpose is both to examine the way the chapter on the body fits within Being and Nothingness as a whole and to show how the arrangement of chapters reflects Sartre’s philosophy, it will be useful to have the book’s general outline before us: Introduction: The Pursuit of Being Part One: The Problem of Nothingness Chapter One: The Origin of Negation Chapter Two: Bad Faith Part Two: Being-for-Itself Chapter One: Immediate Structures of the For-Itself Chapter Two: Temporality Chapter Three: Transcendence Part Three: Being-for-Others Chapter One: The Existence of Others Chapter Two: The Body Chapter Three: Concrete Relations with Others Part Four: Having, Doing, Being Chapter One: Being and Doing: Freedom Chapter Two: Doing and Having Conclusion If we look at this outline as giving a list of parts and chapters that could be read more or less independently and that are united by the loose structure that is found in the expository writing which is evident in Merleau-Ponty’s own works, then it does seem that Sartre has little regard for the human body. But if we keep in mind Sartre’s overall methodology, which is to reveal the degree to which the world is human because of the advent of bodily consciousness within matter, it becomes clear why and how the book pivots about the chapter on the body in part 3. In Sartre’s methodology, a direct, expository approach to the body would effectively mean that we examine our body as an object. It would not help to claim, ‘Look, I want to consider the lived body.’ If these are the first words that the phenomenologist utters about the human body, then, for Sartre, he or she unknowingly enters within the conceptual and linguistic framework that already accepts the body as an object. Our body is first out in the world; it is in things having color, sound, textures, and as being here rather than there. Because of the depth of the


body, things have depth. It is the body that establishes the condition for the possibility of perception, and it is the body that gives depth to the horizon of perception. Phenomenologically, we move from the body as it differentiates matter into a world to other people as bodies that in turn reveal our body to us as the lived center of relations. No doubt this is more anthropocentrism than Merleau-Ponty would allow, for he would immediately remind us that the other is already in the world, and thus the center of relations is never an individual. But the level of discussion is not the same. Merleau-Ponty’s basic concerns are not those of Sartre, or at least the primacy of the concerns are not the same. Sartre’s ontology is primarily concerned with the way a world comes to be through the human body, and the way each body is in its own way a solution to the problem of being. One human body, or as Sartre claims in The Family Idiot, one organism, is enough to give us a world. True, a lone human organism would not give us the world as we know it conceptually. On this conceptual level we are indebted to others; for we know the world and ourselves only by first interiorizing the way others see the world and us. Sartre does not deny this; nevertheless, in the early chapters he is concerned with the basic differentiation of matter into things, and, on this level, even one organic existence would organize a world about it, and it would do so without being aware of itself as a body, even though that is exactly what it is. That this is Sartre’s view is evident if we return to two of the previous quotations and fill in some of the earlier sentences: Perhaps some may be surprised that we have treated the problem of knowing without raising the question of the body and the senses or even once referring to it. It is not my purpose to misunderstand or to ignore the role of the body. But what is important above all else, in ontology as elsewhere, is to observe strict order in discussion. Now the body, whatever may be its function, appears first as the known. (BN 218; my italics) And again: The problem of the body and its relations with consciousness is often obscured by the fact that while the body is from the start posited as a certain thing having its own laws and capable of being defined from outside, consciousness is then reached by the type of inner intuition which is peculiar to it. . . . But these difficulties all stem from the fact that I try to unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others. . . . it is important to choose the order of our bits of knowledge. (BN 303)

34

Joseph S. Catalano

From a phenomenological perspective, the human body as such is a late appearance, and this claim is true even of the lived body. To repeat again, in our engaged activities we pass through our bodies. By using what he calls ‘pure reflection’, the phenomenological task is to move the lived body out of the background into our philosophic awareness.4 Thus, once the body has been separated from the world, the phenomenological task is to describe how we proceed from a lived awareness of the body to a conceptual understanding of it. We are thus led to see that the notion of body is not univocal; that is to say, there is no general notion of body that includes rocks and human bodies. Nevertheless, only matter exists, for nothingness is not a being, but the distinctive matter of the human body. The nothingness of the first part of Being and Nothingness is, in the second part, shown to be the self’s lack of identity with its selfhood. In the third and fourth parts, this lack of identity of the self with its selfhood is shown to fracture matter into a world, not by making the world out of some primordial goo, but by showing how the qualities of the world are just the ones they are because of matter’s relation to the body. Again, Sartre writes: Far from the relation of the body to objects being a problem, we never apprehend the body outside this relation. . . . A body is a body as this mass of flesh which it is is defined by the table which the body looks at, the chair in which it sits, the pavement on which it walks, etc. . . . The body is the totality of meaningful relations to the world. (BN 344) Merleau-Ponty would want these remarks to have been made earlier, and he would no doubt wish to qualify them in two ways. First, he would insist that the relation between the body and the world is more or less reciprocal, or at least more ambiguous, and he would also note that we cannot limit ourselves to one body.5 ‘Thus, to sum up, the ambiguity of being in the world is translated by that of the body, and this is understood through time.’ For me the notion of ambiguity is empty unless it signifies that being somehow reaches to us without our questioning it. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty does not press the issue of ambiguity and that of our bond with being. ‘Thus we refute both intellectualism and empiricism by simply saying that the world has meaning’ (PP 177).6 The Sartrean question is: Does it have this meaning of itself, and if so how did it acquire it? Can we have Aristotle’s nature without the separated substances? Or are we to hold to a quasi-Hegelian union of mind and matter? Fundamentally, I think that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre are concerned in their two early works with different problems, although at times their concerns do indeed meet.7 On his own level, Merleau-Ponty is almost without peer. ‘The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself’ (PP 184).


In general, however, unlike Merleau-Ponty and more like Heidegger, Sartre is primarily concerned with the ontological bond of the human conscious body with the world. I understand Sartre to be holding to a kind of ‘worldmaking’ in which each existence is an existential ‘solution’ to the problem of being; for example, the choice of an active or passive response to the world. ‘My ultimate and initial project – for these are but one – is, as we shall see, always the outline of a solution of the problem of being’ (BN 463). From the perspective of world-making Sartre can be understood to be ontologizing Nelson Goodman’s and Hilary Putnam’s later claims about how our language makes our world. World-making does put Sartre in opposition to Merleau-Ponty, but not in the way Merleau-Ponty conceives it. Both the world-making and the difference in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of it emerge if we turn to Sartre’s view of sensation and to what he terms the various levels on which the body can exist. Sartre claims that the usual approach to sensation and perception reverses the proper ontological order. Sensation and perception are not first ways of getting to know about the world or the existence of others; rather, they are that through which we are a being-in-the-world. The realization that our consciousness is in the form of a body with senses is simultaneously the awareness that our world and our presence in it are situational. For, while it is contingent that we be here rather than there, it is not contingent that we must be either here or there. Reciprocally, while there is no necessity that this tree be approached from here rather than from there, it is necessary that it be visible or touchable only from here or there. On the other hand, the remarkable thing about our awareness of things is that we are not explicitly aware of our perception as arising from a perspective. We are aware of the sunset, of looking out a window, of reading or running, and only upon reflection are we aware that we do all of these things from this angle or perspective rather than some other. Therefore my body is a conscious structure of my consciousness. But precisely because the body is the point of view on which there cannot be a point of view, there is on the level of the unreflective consciousness no consciousness of the body . . . In short, consciousness (of) the body is lateral and retrospective; the body is the neglected, the ‘passed by in silence.’ And yet the body is what this consciousness is; it is not even anything except body. The rest is nothingness and silence. (BN 330) This is the crucial point. For Sartre, we cannot phenomenologically start with sensation, for the senses are not merely a knowing of things but a revealing and discriminating of matter into things. In this primary bond of the body to the world, we pass through the body and discover it in the world. Initially,

36

Joseph S. Catalano

this phenomenological process gives the impression that the world is constituted by some mind. But, consciousness is the body, and nothingness is, in the concrete the flesh of the body. At least I recommend this reading of Sartre’s ‘nothingness’, and it initiates, I think, an interesting dialogue between the two thinkers.8 Sartre’s phenomenological reflection, a reflection that is also a ‘destruction’, is revealed in the way Being and Nothingness pivots about the chapter on the body. The book and the reflection are of one piece. When we have retraced the body in the world to the body as the source of the continuity of things over time, we then become aware of what Sartre calls the three dimensions of the body. Once properly placed, these are fairly readable, with one caveat. Whereas Merleau-Ponty situates his own view amidst relatively brief descriptions of positions that he regards as errors, Sartre’s minor dialectic is more extensive. First, Sartre continues at great length in these alternate views, and second, he does not, for the most part, consider them so much as errors as misconceived stages in the understanding of the body. Thus, the body and the senses are indeed objects, but their objectivity follows from their primary lived condition. This gives Sartre the so-called ‘dimensions’ of the body. I do not think that this is the place to repeat a commentary on the dimensions of the body. It may be useful to once again repeat that on the first ontological level we have no notion of sensation, nor does sensation make any sense on this level. True, we are intentionally thrown out toward the world by our senses; but this primary intentional awareness is not sensation. We touch, we read, we write, we hear and we taste; but in all these instances we are first and foremost aware of the melon we are touching, the text we are reading, the letter we are writing, the person we are listening to and the wine we are tasting. We are our hands, eyes, ears or mouth. This does not mean that the rest of our body disappears or that the world or others are not important. Rather, when I am pre-reflectively engrossed in an activity, my consciousness is one with that activity; the totality of my body, the world and others are the ground on which and from which I act. Of course, it is true that I am reading using my eyes, sitting in this chair, from which the light comes from this direction, and that the entire ensemble including the book have been made by others. But when I am engrossed in a perception or an activity, I pass through all of this, and I have no point of view on my own bodily perceptions or actions. When, however, I see someone reading a book or looking at a friend, I then become aware that these activities are done through the eyes, and I attribute to the other an activity that philosophers call ‘sensation’. I now return and interpret the use of my senses as ‘sensations’. I begin to have a conceptual awareness of my body precisely as it is a knowing organism within the world in the midst of others. On this conceptual level, it is indeed proper to speak of sensations.


This approach, when and if it is understood, which is seldom, may still leave a Heideggerian unhappy. What about the Mitsein? Should not our relation to the other be on the first ontological level? I have already mentioned that the primary issue for Sartre is one of world-making. Apart from this, however, the issue of our union with others also concerns the degree to which we give full weight to the contingency of human existence, not attempting to hide the ontic beneath the ontological. We cannot avoid the partly confusing and embarrassing aspects of conflict described in chapter 3 of part 3, ‘Concrete Relations with Others’. I think that it is best to accept these as quasi-historical a priori, even though it took Sartre some time to realize this. In either case, conflict can be overcome, and it emphasizes the fact that reciprocity is constituted. My friend Peter confronts me as an irreducible contingent fact; he is this corporeal, fleshy consciousness. ‘What for the Other is his taste of himself becomes for me the Other’s flesh. The flesh is the pure contingency of presence’ (BN 343). Further, every individual is like Peter: each person is a unique and contingent happening, and the bond between people is positive only to the degree that we have made it to be so. We thus constitute ourselves and our natures, and the growth in Sartre’s thought consists in a greater understanding of the social dimensions of this constitution. The movement from Being and Nothingness to Saint Genet, and then to Critique of Dialectical Reason, and finally to The Family Idiot is a progression in awareness of the social and historical realms of this constituting. For example, it is Flaubert’s mother who is responsible for moulding his body so that he could not get beyond activity, although what Flaubert did with that limitation is another question.

Conclusion Being and Nothingness unfolds a phenomenological reflection that reveals the degree to which the world is human. Sartre is not involved in the type of constitution that Husserl refers to in Cartesian Meditations. It is not the mind but the fact that consciousness appears through organs that differentiates the world into things. This revealing that is a distinguishing of things does not imply, as Merleau-Ponty would have us believe, that being must thereby be lucidly known with no depth. The fact that we make a hat does not mean that we know all about the materials used. Of course, Sartre is not referring to a neo-Aristotelian matter–form relation. The senses are more like doors that we open on reality, revealing it to have color, sound, textures, and so on. What we find when the door is open is another matter. True, Sartre frequently refers to lucidity, but again the term is contextual. Primarily, terms such as lucidity and translucency imply that we are immediately bonded to being and not merely to its ‘whatness’. These terms do not at all imply conceptual clarity either about reality, ourselves or others. Indeed, this is explicitly denied by Sartre both in the way the entire book

38

Joseph S. Catalano

unfolds, placing misunderstandings, for example, about sensation, in their proper phenomenological place, and showing, particularly in the chapter ‘Existential Psychoanalysis’, how we misconceive our ego. I understand the key difference between Sartre’s philosophy, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s thought, on the other hand, to consist in Sartre’s anthropocentric stance, and this stance is again evident in Sartre’s use of language. If human consciousness, human freedom and human understanding are all that there is, then these qualities can justifiably be described as absolute. Limitations in consciousness, freedom or understanding are simply more accurate ways of describing these qualities, and they remain absolute. The only way we could refer to the qualities of freedom, consciousness and understanding as not absolute is if we secretly believed that there might be another source limiting them. And, I think that, unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (and Heidegger) desires such a source, even if he does not explicitly mention it in Phenomenology of Perception. That Sartre’s anthropocentric stance is what separates the two thinkers is again evident in Merleau-Ponty’s objection to Sartre’s notion of freedom in the last chapter. Merleau-Ponty attempts to show that a rock is difficult to climb not merely because of a human project, but because the relation of the mountain to what human legs can ordinarily perform: ‘Whether or not I have decided to climb them, these mountains appear high to me, because they exceed the body’s power to take them in stride’ (PP 440). One does not have to imaginatively place the body on Sirius to realize that the real issue is why anyone should be concerned with climbing mountains at all. I am perfectly happy taking all mountains in stride with my eyes. Merleau-Ponty’s objection is more focused when he considers why the climber yields to his fatigue: ‘But here once more we must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: an attitude towards the world, when it has received frequent confirmation, acquires a favored status for us’ (PP 441). Granting that Sartre minimized the degree to which others, particularly our parents, can constitute our passivity, we are still left with an important question about the climber who gives into his fatigue (see BN 453–6). The point is that he could have gone on until he collapsed. On the other hand, we see here the difference in perspectives. For Sartre, ontology does not examine the genesis of a project. Sartre becomes concerned with these questions in his philosophical biographies, such as on Genet and particularly Flaubert. But always the point will be that passivity is constituted, if not by our project, then by others. And, more importantly, we never know that predispositions are primary, and, in the final analysis, our freedom is what we do with what has been given to us. Still, there is an important point here, and it concerns the status of passivity and receptivity. Let us assume that one person has a predisposition, arising from whatever causes, to be passive. The Sartrean point is that passivity can never be neutral; it always encounters us as meaningful, for example,


as something to fight against or as something to yield to. The general anthropocentric issue is whether Being, precisely as it is receptive, reaches out to us. For Sartre, this reaching out could only come from a specific direction, and, as such, the invitation could only come from another mind, transcendent to the world. I think that Merleau-Ponty wants more than his objections to Sartre indicate. The so-called turn from Being and Time to Time and Being, and the movement from the Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible, go in opposite directions to Sartre’s growth from Being and Nothingness to The Family Idiot. For Sartre, the doors to reality open only from our end. Our bonds to nature and to others are not reciprocal in the sense that reciprocity is taken to be an a priori positive, nurturing bond. Precisely as they are meaningful structures, passivity and reciprocity are always constituted, if not by the individual, then by the family and the social structure. Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, Buber and, I think, also Merleau-Ponty desire to justify a poetic, passive openness to reality. Some slight breeze blows open a door within being, and some spirit beckons. For Sartre, our bodies open all the doors within being, and, in the social order, we create the doors to be opened. Hope for a better humanity indeed exists, but only insofar as we create the conditions for the possibility of this hope.

Notes 1. I am not alone in reading Being and Nothingness in relation to Heidegger’s Being and Time. See, for example, Fell 1979. I do not agree with a good deal of what Fell has to say, but, for the most part, he places the discussion on the proper level, and he does not have most of the problems with Being and Nothingness that many Sartreans have. Also, I have discussed the Sartrean canon in Catalano 1996: 6–9. 2. See Catalano 1986: 14–17, 90–1, 136–7, and passim. 3. PP 215. Actually, there is little of consequence in this entire chapter that is in opposition to Sartre. 4. I have discussed pure reflection elsewhere, although not in comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s objections. See Catalano 1974: 126–31; also Catalano 1986: 42–5, 194–5. 5. Long before Donald Davidson proposed anomalous monism as a solution to the apparent dualism of mind and matter, Sartre had given us a non-reductive materialism, that is, a monism of matter in which the human organism is not reduced to the thinghood of other material kinds. Indeed, human organic unity is the source of the unity of all other natural kinds, and, from this perspective, Sartre indeed gives a unique role to the human body. 6. I think that this expression does reflect Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and yet I am aware that to some extent I have taken it out of context. The discussion has to do with communication and the nature of the sign, and not with what I call worldmaking. On the level that Merleau-Ponty is considering signs, the world is indeed meaningful; the point is this level assumes the initial advent of human existence within matter. In general, this is another aspect of the divergent emphasis of the two philosophies.

40

Joseph S. Catalano

7. For example, ‘To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in space; it is of it’ (PP 148). But this is not true world-making, and further the entire progression of the chapters on the body shows that MerleauPonty is not really interested in the question of the body’s constitution of the world. 8. See Merleau-Ponty 1968. In his introductory remarks to this (liv), the translator Lingis notes the importance of flesh in Phenomenology of Perception and, as he says, ‘The Flesh . . . is not just a new term for what the Phenomenology of Perception (but already Sartre’s Being and Nothingness) brought to light.’ He then continues to note the development of the notion. In my view of Being and Nothingness, flesh is the invisible through which the world is made visible. I do not think this is MerleauPonty’s view, although, at present, I am not clear about this aspect of his thought. Also, in pushing Merleau-Ponty even slightly in the direction of the later Heidegger, I may be doing him an injustice. I am simply trying to make sense of his general view of interconnections that seem to arise from the body and yet are not to be limited to it.

References Catalano, J. S. (1974). Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. New York: Harper & Row (with new preface, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Catalano, J. S. (1986). Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I: Theory of Practical Ensembles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Catalano, J. S. (1996). Good Faith and Other Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fell, J. P. (1979). Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original French publication: Le Visible et l’invisible, texte établi par Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.)

2 Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation’ Dermot Moran

No phenomenology of life, of body and the flesh, can be constituted without basing itself on a phenomenology of touch. (Jean-Louis Chrétien 2004: 86) In Being and Nothingness, Sartre includes an extraordinary, groundbreaking chapter on ‘the body’ which treats of the body under three headings: ‘The body as being for-itself: facticity’, ‘The body-for-others’ and ‘The third ontological dimension of the body’. While the influence of this chapter on Merleau-Ponty has been acknowledged, Sartre’s phenomenology of the body has in general been neglected. In this chapter, I want to examine Sartre’s debt to Husserl and, in particular, how he departs from Merleau-Ponty especially in his critical treatment of the ‘double sensation’ (the experience of one hand touching the other) which is central to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ‘intertwining’, but which Sartre regards as a non-essential, merely contingent feature of our embodiment. I shall argue that Sartre, even more than Merleau-Ponty, is the phenomenologist par excellence of the flesh (la chair) and of intersubjective intercorporeality while emphasizing that touching oneself is a merely contingent feature and not ‘the foundation for a study of corporeality’.

Sartre’s phenomenology of embodiment The famous chapter in BN entitled ‘The Body’ (Le corps), written in Sartre’s customary dialectical style, is dense, difficult, at times confused, at times brilliant; but, it is also a groundbreaking and radical philosophical meditation on embodiment.1 As always with Sartre, more literary genius than precise academic philosopher, difficult and even opaque technical philosophical analysis intertwines with rich, original and evocative phenomenological descriptions of experience. Its philosophical impact was soon eclipsed by 41

42

Dermot Moran

Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of incarnation and Sartre’s account has been neglected until quite recently.2 Sartre begins from, but creatively interprets the then available phenomenological treatments of the body, to be found, albeit quite scattered, in the phenomenological tradition, especially as Sartre could have encountered it in Edmund Husserl3 and Max Scheler,4 but also strongly influenced by his reading of Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s situatedness and facticity in Being and Time5 . Sartre’s achievement is all the more remarkable given that, at the time of writing, he would have had no direct access to the canonical Husserlian phenomenological discussion of the body in Ideas II,6 for instance, but managed to have a solid grasp of many of Husserl’s views (presumably through his studies in Germany in 1933 and conversations with other French Husserlians such as Raymond Aron and Merleau-Ponty). In the background, of course, is an established, and predominantly French, tradition of physiological and psychological discussion of the body and its relation to the first-person experience of consciousness found in Descartes,7 Condillac,8 Maine de Biran,9 Comte,10 Bergson,11 Maurice Pradines,12 Gabriel Marcel,13 Gaston Bachelard,14 and others, with which Sartre (like Merleau-Ponty) was undoubtedly familiar, at least from his university studies.15 Sartre was strongly interested in empirical psychology as his earlier studies of the imagination16 confirm; but he appears less taken with Gestalt psychology than Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, Sartre’s chapter provisionally maps out much of the ground that would later be retraced in more detail – albeit in a different register – by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (1968, hereafter ‘VI’): the Müller-Lyer illusion, the phenomenon of the supposed ‘double sensation’ (when one hand touches the other or when the opposing fingers of one hand touch each other), the Gestalt figure–ground structure of perception, the artificiality of the standard psychological concept of the sensation,17 the phenomenological nature of experienced pain, the temporality of experience, and so on. Crucially, Sartre introduces the very notion of ‘flesh’ (la chair), which is now more usually associated with MerleauPonty, and develops the flesh as that where intercorporeity is possible. For Sartre, flesh is the locus of contingency and intercorporeity. Flesh is ‘the pure contingency of presence’ (BN 343, EN 410).18 Fleshly incarnation is the living testimony to my contingency. Moreover, it is the experience of this flesh precisely in its sheer given contingency that gives rise to nausea. All flesh, for Sartre, has this nauseating character (BN 357, EN 425): ‘A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness’ (BN 338, EN 404).19 Our deep sense of ourselves, for Sartre, is as a non-thingly living flesh, neither pure object nor pure consciousness. Furthermore, my flesh interacts with and even constitutes the other’s flesh, especially in the acts of touching and caressing: ‘The caress reveals the Other’s flesh as flesh to myself and to

Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation’

43

the Other . . . it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born [qui fait naître la chair d’autrui]’ (BN 390, EN 459–60).

A three-fold ontology of the body Sartre offers a many-layered analysis of the body as encountered from different perspectives, which he terms ontological approaches, in line with the general aspiration expressed in the subtitle of Being and Nothingness to be ‘an essay on phenomenological ontology’. Sartre applies this formal structure on his reflections because he is convinced that the philosophical tradition has misunderstood the body due to the fact that the orders of knowing and the orders of being have been conflated or inverted. Confusion between different ‘ontological levels’ (plans ontologiques, BN 305, EN 367), ‘orders of reality’ (ordres de réalité, BN 304, EN 366) or ‘orders of being’ (cf. l’ordre de l’être, BN 305, EN 367)20 is the cause of our philosophical problems concerning the nature of embodiment. Those who have made the objective body-forothers the basis of all understanding of the body have ‘radically reversed the terms of the problem’ (BN 358, EN 426). In effect, as Sartre evocatively puts it, this is ‘to put the corpse at the origin of the living body’ (BN 344, EN 411). Sartre now wants to develop a set of reflections that follows the order of being, the ontological order, the various ‘levels’ (plans) of our understanding of the body. This ‘ontological’ approach is reflected in the tripartite structure of the chapter: ‘The Body as Being-for-itself: Facticity’(Le corps comme être pour soi: La facticité); ‘The Body-for-Others’ (Le-corps-pour-autrui) and what Sartre awkwardly calls ‘The Third Ontological Dimension of the Body’ (La troisième dimension ontologique du corps). The first two levels map the distinction between the body as grasped by oneself (for itself) and the body as perceived or seen by others (including the other’s own body). I have one kind of knowledge of the body in my experience and another experience of the body given through the perspective of the other: the body as it is ‘for me’ and the body as it is ‘for others’ or ‘for the other’ (pour l’autrui). These two ontological dimensions in relation to the body have to be distinguished: they are, according to Sartre, ‘incommunicable’ and ‘irreconcilable’: ‘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’ (BN 304, EN 366). Sartre also characterizes these dimensions as ‘le corps-existé’, the body as existed or lived, and ‘le corps-vu’, the body as seen from the perspective of the other (BN 358, EN 426). The first ‘ontological dimension’ approaches the body from the manner in which, as Sartre puts it, ‘I exist my body’ (J’existe mon corps, BN 351, EN 428). This is the body as ‘non-thing’, as a transparent medium for my experience of the world, but also as somehow surpassed toward the world. The material objective body is the body as understood in an idealized way by the objective sciences (physics, biology, physiology, and so on); it is the body

44

Dermot Moran

one hears about from others. It is, in Sartre’s pithy phrase, the ‘body of others’ (le corps d’autrui), the body in the region of the anonymous other. This second dimension includes the manner in which my body is utilized by the other (and utilized by myself occupying the role of third-person observer of my body), for example, the way I encounter my body as a ‘tool of tools’ in its instrumental interaction with things in the world. Sartre says: ‘We do not use this instrument, for we are it’ (BN 324, EN 388). Sartre has interesting things to say about this tool which is not experienced as a tool. Unfortunately, further exploration of this topic (and its connection to Heidegger’s analysis of Zuhandensein) is outside the scope of this chapter. The third dimension is the most complicated and difficult to grasp – it is exploring the manner in which ‘I exist for myself as a body known by the Other’ (BN 351, EN 419), what Martin C. Dillon has characterized as ‘the body-for-itself-for-others’.21 This is the body in its intersubjective, intercorporeal, interactive dimension. The body, Sartre says, is a site of action – including interaction. According to this ontological dimension, I experience my own body not on my own, but as reflected in the experience of it by others, the dialectics of which Sartre has explored perhaps more than any other phenomenologist (with the exception of Levinas). For example, Sartre writes: ‘I cannot be embarrassed by my own body as I exist it. It is my body as it may exist for the other which may embarrass me’ (BN 353, EN 421). This third dimension of the body includes the manner in which I experience it under the ‘omnipresent’ – but often empirically ‘absent’ – look (regard) of the other, as in the case of shame, shyness or embarrassment, where I experience how the other sees me. I am, as Sartre says, ‘imprisoned in an absence’ (BN 363, 430). The other is a kind of ‘internal haemorrhage’ (BN 257, EN 315) in my world, which robs me of the total control I seek to exercise over it. For Sartre, the body as I encounter it through others is a contested domain: ‘Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others’ (Le conflit est le sens original de l’être-pour-autrui, BN 364, EN 431). Despite the life-and-death struggle with the other, the other provides a necessary function: the other reveals to me something I cannot learn on my own: how I really am (see BN 354, EN 421). In fact, Sartre rejects the analogical constitution of the other’s body on the basis of my experience of my own, since I must already have the other as object and have myself as object (which requires already being in the gaze of the other). Sartre’s threefold ontological distinction is awkward since the ontological categories appear to overlap (as the body can be experienced in two ways in relation to others – as instrument or object or by me as seen by the other) and also because there are not three bodies as the ontological distinction might imply. However, there is something both original and insightful about his approach. He claims that my experiencing my body in the gaze of the other does not make it a simple object to me; rather, I experience the ‘flight of the body which I exist’ (BN 354, EN 422). In other words, the other presents


45

me as I really am and also takes away control of my body-image from me. The other is entwined with my body from the start. Sartre begins not with the body seeing or touching itself, but with the body as seen or touched by the other. There is a co-constitution going on between my body and the other, which challenges more traditional approaches to the constitution of the other’s body through empathy found especially in Scheler.22

Le corps existé Despite the priority science gives to the body-for-others, Sartre begins with the body as lived and experienced from the first-person perspective. In this sense, as he makes clear, the lived, experienced body (le corps-existé) – corresponding to Husserl’s animate body (Leib) – is never to be construed as an ‘object’ at a remove from consciousness, and certainly not a material object. Hence, Sartre asserts: ‘The body is the psychic object par excellence – the only psychic object’ (BN 347, EN 414).23 This is an important claim. The body permeates our psyche; it is present even in dreams, and the body we experience from within is itself psychically constituted. Sartre distinguishes between this psychic body experienced from within, from which perspective it is, in a sense, invisible, ‘impalpable’, even ‘ineffable’ (ineffable, BN 354, EN 421),24 and the body as object in the world (as seen from the perspective of the ‘other’). Sartre here speaks about ‘the physical point of view’, the ‘point of view of the outside, of exteriority’ (le point de vue du dehors, de l’extériorité, BN 305, EN 367). I do not know experientially that I have a brain or endocrine glands (BN 303, EN 365); that is something I learn from others (even a ‘headache’ or ‘brain-freeze’ does not reveal the brain as an ‘in itself’). Likewise, I do not know experientially the inner anatomy of my body. Of course, I have, to put it in different terms, a ‘folk anatomy’ – where I think I feel my heart, stomach, ribs, liver, and so on. This is guided by a kind of inner sense of our organs, the felt beating of the heart, the felt expansion of the lungs, and so on. This can be more or less well informed by science, more or less accurate, and this scientific map of the body structure, while it is superimposed on the felt body, does not necessarily coincide with the body as felt, as immediately experienced in what earlier psychologists misleadingly called ‘inner perception’. Sartre makes this clear in his discussion of his experience of an ulcerous stomach: At this level, however, ‘the stomach’ is an inexpressible; it can neither be named nor thought. Objective empirical thought . . . is the knowing of a certain objective nature possessed by the stomach. I know that it has the shape of a bagpipe, that it is a sack, that it produces juices . . . In any case, all this can constitute my illness, not as I enjoy possession of it, but as it escapes me. The stomach and the ulcer become directions of flight, perspectives of alienation from the object which I possess. (BN 356, EN 424)

46

Dermot Moran

In contrast to this projected ‘objective body’ (the object of ‘objectivating knowing’, savoir objectivant, BN 355, EN 423), Sartre maintains there is an immediately, but somewhat indefinitely, intuited body25 (akin to MerleauPonty’s ‘phenomenal body’ with its schéma corporel) – one experiences it in attempting to walk a tightrope or learn to ski, or in the eye of the other who approves or disapproves.26 Most of the time, this felt body is not objectified but rather is experienced in a diffuse, amorphous and almost invisible and impalpable manner (which is precisely its mode of appearing). This nonapprehended body swims in the world, as it were, unnoticed. This intuitively felt body becomes obtrusive in illness (I become dizzy and lose my balance), failure (the stone is too heavy to lift), disability (I cannot feel my leg) or in psychosomatic conditions (in anorexia nervosa I experience my body as too gross),27 or, as Sartre emphasizes with great force and originality, in the look of the other. In Ideas II, Husserl had already discussed the difference between normal cases and those where something gets in the way, – for example, touching a surface with a blister on one’s finger (Ideas II §18, 66; Hua IV 61); seeing yellow after consuming the anthelminthic drug santonin (ibid., 67; Hua IV 62). But Sartre’s original contribution is to distinguish the felt body as experienced on one’s own (‘for itself’) from the body as felt escaping from me in the gaze of the other (the third ontological dimension). Sartre’s account of the second ontological category again has two aspects. First, there is the constitution of the ‘objective’ body as that which is the normal model of the body in the sciences. Second, and this largely follows Heidegger’s account of Zuhandensein, there is the body that mediates the instrumentality of things in the world and itself (as hands, eyes, and so on) is revealed as an instrument of instruments, ‘being-a-tool-among-tools’ (BN 352, EN 420); a centre of reference in the world. According to Sartre, most of the time my orientation is not toward this vaguely felt, internally apprehended body; rather, my intention is to the ‘world’ or, more exactly, to my world in the first instance. In Sartre’s language, the body (itself a transcendence beyond my immanence) is itself transcended in an act of intending toward the world; the body becomes a ‘transcendence transcended’ (BN 347, EN 414). Against this, Sartre argues, the psychologist’s concept of subjectivity is of an immanence which cannot get outside of itself (BN 314, EN 377). Furthermore, while there is a profound sense that the body is available to me as an object, for Sartre, when I see and touch parts of my body I am, in these situations, still experiencing my body from without, from what Sartre calls the point of view of an ‘other’: ‘I am the other in relation to my eye’ (BN 304, EN 366). I can see my eye as a sense organ but I cannot ‘see the seeing’ (ibid.). I see my hand, Sartre acknowledges, but only in the way that I see the inkwell. (This experience is well documented in Sartre’s other writings, for example, in Nausea.) For Sartre, I cannot see the sensitivity of the hand or even the ‘mineness’ of my hand: ‘For


47

my hand reveals to me the resistance of objects, their hardness or softness, but not itself. Thus I see this hand only in the way that I see this inkwell. I unfold a distance between it and me . . . ’ (BN 304, EN 366). The notion of a ‘distance’ between the ego and the experience of the body is something that had already been discussed by Husserl and his student Edith Stein. Stein writes that sensation is always localized at a distance from the ego.28 There is a kind of experienced distance between myself and my body yet my body cannot be separated from me.29 Sartre is claiming – here in disagreement with Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see – that my sight, and indeed my touch, gives me my body in the same way as it is seen or touched by another. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both emphasize the continued presence of the body felt from within in all cases of perceiving, whereas Sartre maintains that our perceivings objectify, externalize and alienate what we perceive and also displace us from ourselves. What Sartre calls ‘thetic consciousness’ is objectifying; for Husserl, it is reifying and objectifying. I see the bodies of others (in scientific textbooks, and so on) and conclude that I have a body like that of others. Physicians and others have an experience of my body, but they experience it as a piece of the world, ‘in the midst of the world [au milieu du monde]’ (BN 303, EN 365). This is the body in its ‘being for others [être-pour-autrui])’ (BN 305, Fr 367). Sartre’s originality is his claim that my own body is present to me in this way most of the time. I see my hand as something relatively extraneous, at a distance from me, as an object in the world.30 There is, then, a kind of ‘for-others’ objectivity of the body. Nevertheless, Sartre strongly rejects the traditional view that we should begin from this physicalist or second- or third-person view of the body as a body among other physical objects. In fact, Sartre’s analysis begins with the recognition of the ‘insurmountable difficulties’ (BN 303, EN 365) involved in attempting to unite an account of experiential consciousness (arrived at from within) with the more common ‘externalist’ (du dehors) (BN 303, EN 365) account of the living body possessing organs, a nervous system, and so on. The failure of previous philosophy is that it has, mistakenly and indeed absurdly, attempted to unite the paradoxical first-person experience of one’s consciousness31 with a conception of body that is in fact derived from others, or, as Sartre puts it, ‘the body of others’ (corps des autres) (BN 303, EN 365). This is a confusion of ontological levels, or, in Ryle’s parlance, a ‘category mistake’. For Sartre, one cannot begin (Cartesian-style) from the interiority of reflective consciousness and then attempt to graft on the physical body. One cannot assume that the third-person body belongs to the same ontological order as that of the transcendence-transcended. Rejecting this attempt to unite mind and body as hopeless, Sartre maintains that the starting point for any phenomenological description has to be the recognition that our naive experience is first and foremost not of the body strictly speaking at all, but rather of the world, or the situation. As Sartre

48

Dermot Moran

asserts early in Being and Nothingness: ‘Our being is immediately “in situation”; that is, it arises in enterprises and knows itself first in so far as it is reflected in those enterprises’ (BN 39, EN 76). Sartre reiterates this claim in the chapter on the body: ‘the body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the world is the total situation of the for-itself and the measure of its existence’ (BN 309, EN 372). Sartre emphasizes in all his writings that we are first and foremost in the world or ‘in the situation’. This ‘in-the-worldness’, so to speak, of our experience is the central lesson that Sartre believes phenomenology has given to correct both traditional empiricist and idealist approaches to the relation of subject and object. For instance, in his short but important essay ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ (1939), Sartre declares that Husserl’s phenomenology has put us in direct contact with the world and restored the world to us: ‘Consciousness and the world are given in one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness.’ And again: ‘Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, with its havens of mercy and love.’32 For Sartre, phenomenology has decisively rejected all efforts to give a representationalist account of knowledge whereby external reality is somehow represented in the mind of the knower. Sartre wants instead to empty out the knower into the world; to overcome the false concept of consciousness as a box with contents. (Husserl also rejects this conception of consciousness.) While, on one standard approach, consciousness may be considered an ‘absolute interiority’ (BN 305, EN 367), which somehow is directly accessible to itself (in illustration, Sartre quotes Descartes’ Meditations claim that the soul is easier to know than the body), Sartre rejects this notion as a construction of idealism. Furthermore, Sartre connects this, as it might be termed, ‘externalist’ orientation of intentionality as found in Husserlian phenomenology with Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-sein, êtredans-le-monde) (BN 306, EN 368) with its facticity and finitude. Sartre absolutely accepts the facticity of embodiment. I have the body I have in this place and time; that is an absolutely meaningless, contingent truth. That is ‘facticity’. Sartre’s adoption of the Heideggerian concept of being-in-theworld overcomes any kind of pre-Kantian conception of the world as divided into ‘things in themselves’ and subjects. For Sartre, all being is experienced in and through subjectivity; just as subjectivity is essentially and primarily world-directed. In BN Sartre writes: ‘Man and the world are relative beings (des êtres relatifs), and the principle of their being is the relation’ (BN 308, EN 370). Sartre, therefore, fully accepts and indeed emphasizes the revolutionary character of describing human existence as ‘being-in-the-world’. Our experience is world-oriented; we find ourselves in the midst of worldly situations. We transcend or surpass (dépasser) ourselves toward a world.


49

Attempting to give his own twist to the Heideggerian conception, Sartre gives this notion of ‘being-in-the-world’ a more dynamic sense: ‘to be is to fly out into the world’.33 For Sartre the Husserlian phenomenological conception of ‘transcendence in immanence’ means essentially that the whole thrust of human subjectivity is to overcome or cancel itself out, ‘nihilate’ itself (néantiser, in Sartre’s terminology) by intending toward the world. Intentionality is world-directedness; human desire and knowing is toward-the-world and already in the world. Sartre frequently speaks of the manner in which the embodied consciousness has to ‘surpass’ (dépasse) itself. This ‘surpassing’ constitutes the essence of intentionality understood as selftranscendence.34 It is because of our intentional directedness to the world that we have to overcome, surpass, transcend the body. But, of course, this surpassing of the body does not by any means eliminate it: ‘The body is necessary again as the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the obstacle which I am to myself’ (BN 326, EN 391). For Sartre, our transcendence toward the world is part of what he takes to be our original ‘upsurge in the world’ (surgissement dans le monde).35 ‘But it is we ourselves who decide these very dimensions by our very upsurge [notre surgissement] into the world and it is very necessary that we decide them, for otherwise they would not be at all’ (BN 308, EN 370). Throughout Being and Nothingness, Sartre speaks of this ‘upsurge’ (surgissement) of the pour-soi toward the world. This ‘upsurge’ has both a certain necessity and a certain contingency, the combination going by the name of ‘facticity’. A significant part of Sartre’s claim is that by intending the world, humans also constitute or make the world. It comes into being at the same time as our intentional engagement with it. Sartre talks about the nature of the ‘foritself’ as necessarily surpassing the world, but also as causing ‘there to be a world by surpassing it’ (BN 326–7, EN 391).36 Indeed, it is my flesh that creates the flesh of the other, and so on. Nevertheless, despite the fact the object of our experience is the world (things, events, projects), it is also true that the world is experienced in and through the lived body. Sartre, following Husserl’s phenomenological tradition, insists that consciousness can only be consciousness as embodied or incarnate: the body is the ‘condition of possibility’ for the psyche (BN 338, EN 404). Embodiment situates and locates consciousness, gives it the orientation and point of view that makes it possible as consciousness, as for-itself: ‘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’ (BN 309, EN 372). I am in contact with the world through my body: things are experienced as heavy or light, near or far. There is a visual scene because I have eyes that can see and also be seen. As Merleau-Ponty says: ‘to see is to enter a universe of beings that display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other . . . in other words to look at an object is to inhabit it.’ Moreover: ‘Apart from the probing

50

Dermot Moran

of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning’ (PP 214, Fr. 248). The room feels warm because we are sensitive to heat. Other living bodies too present themselves in a special way. We experience them as sensitive. (Sartre claims, however, that we distance ourselves from that experiencing in our ordinary behaviour.) In pre-reflective, normal consciousness we are entirely oriented to and in the world. We are worldly through and through. We are, in Husserl’s words, ‘children of the world’ (Weltkinder). For Merleau-Ponty, we are ‘connatural with the world’ (PP 217, Fr. 251). Sartre too emphasizes that the world is a world that has been humanized: ‘the world is human’ (BN 218, EN 270). Everywhere in the world, all one encounters is oneself. The world is coloured because we have eyes that pick up colour. The steps appear as something we can climb. As Sartre puts it: ‘The body is the totality of meaningful relationships to the world . . . The body in fact could not appear without sustaining meaningful relations with the totality of what is’ (BN 344, EN 411). Sartre’s claim is that consciousness is primarily an active engagement with the world, which is not necessarily explicitly conscious of itself at the same time. Explicit, reflective self-consciousness is not a part of our original, ‘unreflected’ or ‘pre-reflective’ conscious engagement with the world. As he puts it, if I am chasing a tram, there is only consciousness of the tram-having-tobe-overtaken, nothing else.37 There is a tram to be caught; a road surface to be walked, and so on. I experience all instrumentalities (handles, tools) because I have a body and yet I do not encounter my body. Rather, I encounter objects that are to be lifted, that are to be walked around. There is, Sartre says, a quality to reality that is well captured by the Latin gerundive or future passive participle: Carthago delenda est; Carthage is ‘to be destroyed’ (for the Romans), or ‘to be served’ (for the Carthaginians). Reality is always revealed in the intentional project of the subject engaged in the situation. Sartre’s insistence on the lack of self-consciousness of our original ‘positional’ or thetic consciousness requires him to play down the level of immediate consciousness of our body and our perceivings. He claims instead that we have an ‘immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself’ (rapport immédiat et non cognitive de soi à soi) (BN xxix, EN 19). Merleau-Ponty makes a similar – if somewhat more carefully modulated – claim concerning our preoccupation with the world and our mutual embodied belonging with it. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Sartre and Husserl, consciousness is essentially embodied: In so far as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. (PP 408, Fr. 467)


51

Merleau-Ponty goes on to make an important point which is relevant also for Sartre’s ontological exploration of the body:

The ontological world and body which we find at the core of the subject are not the world or body as idea [le monde en idée ou le corps en idée] but on the one hand the world itself contracted into a comprehensive grasp, and on the other the body itself as a knowing body [comme corps-connaissant]. (PP 408, Fr. 467)

The usual concepts of objective world in itself and objective body as such have to be replaced by the phenomenological concept of an animate, lived embodiment in the world as the living context for the embodied subject who has an immediate but almost impalpable sense of itself. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in PP, even in moments where our intimate consciousness of our body takes the upper hand, this by no means cancels out the world:

Even if I become absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensations, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world. At every moment some intention springs afresh from me, if it is only toward the things round about me which catch my eye, or toward the instants, which are thrown up, and which thrust back into the past what I have just lived through. I never become completely a thing in the world; the density of existence as a thing always evades me, my own substance slips away from me internally, and some intention is always foreshadowed. (PP 165, Fr. 192–3)38

Merleau-Ponty goes on to talk, in terms reminiscent of Sartre, about the manner in which the body becomes prey to an ‘active nothingness’ (un néant actif, PP 165, Fr. 193) when it reaches forward to its projects, to its temporal futurity. The problem as it will emerge in Sartre is the following: given that each of us creates the world through our intentional engagements, do we – and if so how do we – all belong to the one world? Does not each of us have his or her own projected world, his or her ‘gerundive’? Sartre’s third ontological level, the body as seen by others and as I see others seeing it, is his attempt to introduce this necessary intersubjectivity to the discussion of the body; but the notion of ‘the’ world remains something contested in Sartre’s account, except that he insists that we always experience it as a mute, resistant, monistic ‘being-in-itself’.

52

Dermot Moran

The lived body: omnipresent but inapprehensible For Sartre, in our experience the body is somehow ‘inapprehensible’ and yet always present. It is this ‘inapprehensible given’ (cet insaisissable donné) (BN 327, EN 392). ‘I exist my body’ (BN 329, EN 394; see also BN 351, EN 418), yet the body in itself is ‘inapprehensible’ and ‘ineffable’. This is another Husserlian position, one that is repeated by Merleau-Ponty: the body is somehow present in all perception.39 It escapes our consciousness and is not objectified in our incarnate acting and doing. In fact, the body as lived is difficult to localize. Sartre recognizes that the body spreads itself over everything with which it is in contact. When I enter a room, I see the person’s desk, the chair he sits it, and so on. His bodily presence in a sense infects the room. The body is somehow omnipresent, as Sartre writes: My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body in so far the house was already an indication of my body. This is why the body always extends across the tool which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I lean and against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole house; for it is my adaptation to these tools. (BN 325, EN 389) Sartre describes the body as omnipresent because it is our way of being inserted into the situation. When I am manoeuvring my car through narrow gates, my awareness is outside myself and along the surface of the car. When reversing, my consciousness is out at the rear of the car.

The body is the for-itself Throughout Being and Nothingness, Sartre invokes the distinction between the ‘in-itself’ (en-soi) and the ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) in different and sometimes incompatible ways. This distinction, inherited from Hegel, cannot be read as a simple, ontological one of two orders of being. Sartre, following Heidegger, insists that ontology can only be done through phenomenology. The initself is always experienced through the for-itself; likewise the for-itself is supported by the in-itself. Sartre takes an important step forward when the body is identified with the for-itself: ‘The body is nothing other than the foritself; it is not an in-itself in the for-itself; for in that case it would solidify everything’ (BN 309, EN 372). Sartre, therefore, identifies the lived body (my body – not the objective body of the other) with the for-itself. The body as a for-itself ‘is never a given (un donné) that I can know’ (BN 309, EN 372). It is everywhere something that is surpassed and hence, in Sartre’s language, ‘nihilated’. The body is that which I nihilate (ce que je néantise) (BN 309, EN 372). On the other


53

hand, the body provides the ‘situation’ of the for-itself as the foundation of its possibilities. It ‘indicates’ my possibilities of being in the world. Sartre’s strong claim is that the body is the very order of the world as ordered by the for-itself. It is the body which gives the subject its orientation and point of view. However, Sartre repeatedly points out that we ‘surpass’ or ‘transcend’ the body in seeking to experience the world. We go beyond our sensations and limb movements to apprehend the world directly. This leads Sartre to explore some essential ‘paradoxes’ (Merleau-Ponty’s term in The Visible and the Invisible) or oppositions that belong to our embodiment. For Sartre, paradoxically, while the body is that which necessarily introduces the notion of perspective and point of view, at the same time the body is a contingent viewpoint on the world. Our body is the very contingency of our being: our facticity. Consciousness never ceases to have a body (or to be a body) even when that body does not intrude, as in the case of being in pain. This perpetual apprehension of the body is what Sartre calls ‘nausea’ and which he takes to be there prior to all feelings of disgust, vertigo, etc. (BN 338, EN 404). This nausea is a kind of ontological unease with having a body, with being limited to a point of view. The for-itself is not closed off from the in itself but is already in the world, it is a ‘relation to the world’ (rapport au monde, BN 306, EN 368). The body belongs to a lived space, where there is left, right, here, there, up, down, and so on. These lived mutual relations (from which the subject cannot be abstracted) can only be suspended in an abstract scientific view of space, a ‘world without men’ (BN 307, EN 369). Let us now explore Sartre’s sense of bodily experience in more detail.

Vision, touch and the ‘double sensation’ Sartre’s phenomenological discussion of the body focuses on the concept of the living flesh, especially as experienced in touching and being touched as well as in being seen (which has priority over seeing). Sartre in particular singles out the phenomenon of the double sensation. The phenomenon of the ‘double sensation’ was a recurrent theme in nineteenthcentury German psychology.40 Indeed, recognition of the peculiarity of touch can be traced back to Aristotle who, in De anima, accorded an extremely important place to touch among all the senses. Aristotle discusses a ‘touch illusion’ whereby one crosses the fingers of one hand and touches an object with the outside of the fingers and has the sense of touching two distinct objects. Aristotle’s illusion is taken up and discussed by E. H. Weber in his groundbreaking studies of touch.41 It is possible that Husserl learned of the concept of ‘double sensation’ from the Göttingen psychologists as he employs the term ‘double sensation’ (Doppelempfindung) in Ideas II §36 (152–4; Hua IV: 144–7), and, indeed, had discussed the phenomenon even earlier in his Thing and Space lectures of 1907.42 There he discusses the

54

Dermot Moran

example of one hand touching the other, and the manner in which sensations of touching can be reversed into sensations of being touched. Husserl here speaks of this ‘intertwining’ and of the constitution of the physical object with the constitution of the ‘ego-body’ (Ichleib). Indeed, in the twentieth century, phenomenology was to the forefront in the exploration of the sense of touch.43 Husserl, in several studies but especially in Ideas II, is interested in unpacking the role of the five senses in building up our sense of the physical world, spatiality and of our embodiment within the world.44 In particular he is interested in the interaction between the sense of vision and that of touch in the manner in which they build up and disclose the unified spatial world we experience.45 In Thing and Space §47, as part of a general discussion of the phenomenon Husserl calls ‘kinaesthesis’, he discusses what ‘sensations’ contribute to the experience of spatiality. In the previous section he had discussed whether visual and touch sensations separately underpin differing conceptions of space, that is, visual space or tactile space. He also discusses the sensations that give the sense of movement. In Thing and Space §47 he claims that the ‘ego-body’ (Ichleib) is a kind of object that is different from physical objects. Husserl’s first point is that visual experiences (seeing the visual scape) are not experienced as ‘localized’ in the body in contradistinction to the way in which I locate touch sensations in the body. Vision in this sense is ‘transparent’. Husserl then discusses the fact that although I touch the smoothness or roughness of the object, I also have a sense of that smoothness ‘on or in the appearing finger tips’. He goes on: If with my left hand I touch my right, then along with the touch sensations and the kinaesthetic sensations there is constituted, reciprocally, the appearance of the left and right hands, the one moving over the other in such and such a manner. At the same time, however, i.e., with a reversal of the apprehension, the self-moving appears in an other sense, which applies only to the body, and in general the same group of sensations which have an objectivating function are apprehended, through a reversal of the attention and apprehension, as subjectivating and specifically as something which members of the body, those that appear in the objectivating function, ‘have’ as localized within themselves. (Thing and Space 137; Hua XVI 162) Husserl claims only to be interested in the ‘intertwining’ (Verflechtung) between the experiences. He sees the sensations as having an objectivating function of allowing the object (smooth surface) to appear, as well as manifesting the body touching it (fingertips), and the appearance of the sensation of the body as a ‘bearer of sensations’. Husserl’s analysis is very complex. He denies that certain ‘kinetic sensations’ have any ‘matter’, but they do allow for an apprehension that transforms them in a more determinate


55

way. Husserl returns to these meditations on the various ‘strata’ in the constitution of ‘visual space’ and ‘tactile space’. In Ideas II §36 he is interested in the manner in which the lived-body (Leib) is constituted as a ‘bearer of localized sensations’. These ‘localized sensations’ he also calls ‘sensings’ (Husserl uses the neologism Empfindisse), which are not directly sensed but can be brought to attention by a shift of apprehension. ‘Localization’, for Husserl, means both that the sensations are somehow distinguished with regard to a certain place in the body, and present the body as objectified in space in a specific ‘fleshly’ way (see Ideas II 153; Hua IV 145). In this section (§36) Husserl introduces the situation of one hand touching the other: in this case, the right hand touching the left. The touching hand has to move in order to feel the smoothness and soft texture of the touched hand. This touching gives rise to sensations, which Husserl calls ‘indicational sensations’ of movement, and with them come the ‘representational’ sensations or ‘appearances’ of smoothness. These representational senses of smoothness in fact belong to the touching right hand but they are ‘objectivated’ in the touched left hand. But Husserl goes on to say that in the touched left hand I also have sensations which are active and ‘localized’ within it. In other words, the left hand is sensitive to being touched and this sensitivity is its own peculiar kind of sensation complex. ‘If I speak of the physical thing, “left hand,” then I am abstracting from these sensations . . . If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, instead it becomes Body [Leib], it senses’ (Ideas II 152; Hua IV 145). As with Sartre, to grasp the hand as a hand is to abstract from or, as Sartre would put it, ‘surpass’ this field of sensory experiences and objectify the hand as a distinct object on its own. If I apprehend the hand with its sensings, Husserl continues, then I am apprehending a living body (Leib). In this context, Husserl speaks of the sensation being ‘doubled’ (Ideas II 153; Hua IV 145) when one hand touches or pinches the other. Furthermore, Husserl (like Katz and later Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see) notes that the sensations can linger after the touching ceases and the hand or fingers have been removed. Husserl distinguishes between sensations that are interpreted as properties of the object and the sensings themselves, which he speaks of as ‘indicational or presentational’ (Ideas II 154; Hua IV 146). Husserl claims that each hand experiences this ‘double sensation’. Each hand has a sensing and a sensed and both occur simultaneously. Moreover, Husserl makes this ‘double sensation’ to be a part of touch but not of vision: ‘in the case of an object constituted purely visually we have nothing comparable’ (Ideas II §37 155; Hua IV 147). Likewise, we see colours, but there is no localized sensing of the experiencing of colour or of the eyes that are doing the seeing: ‘I do not see myself, my body, the way I touch myself’ (Ideas II §37 155; Hua IV 148). I do not constitute my eye as an external object in the same way I constitute the touching hand as an object over and against a second touched object. All

56

Dermot Moran

Husserl will allow is that the eye can also be a centre for touch sensations (the eyeball can be touched, we can feel the movement of the eye in the eye socket, through ‘muscle sensations’, and so on). Husserl concludes: ‘The role of the visual sensations in the correlative constitution of the body and external things is thus different from that of the sensations of touch’ (Ideas II §37 156; Hua IV 148). Husserl’s reflections on the sensory constitution of embodiment and spatiality had an immediate impact in Germany. During Husserl’s sojourn at Göttingen (1901–16), he had a younger student and colleague, the Gestalt psychologist David Katz,46 there.47 Katz developed the most detailed phenomenological analysis of the sensation of touch in his classic 1925 study Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (The World of Touch). In Göttingen, Katz carried out extensive empirical examination of the sense of touch, the different movements of the hand, the difference between touch in sighted and blind persons, and so on. Katz was influenced by Ernst Heinrich Weber’s earlier studies of touch. In Der Tastsinn, for instance, Weber discussed whether two sensations arise when sensitive areas touch each other. He claimed that the two sensations do not merge into one: a cold limb touching a warm limb reveals both heat and cold; or a hand touching the forehead.48 Weber is concerned with which body part feels like the subject and which the object. In one hand touching the other (palm touching the back of the hand) he explains the object as that which has a thinner epidermis. Katz emphasized the formative role of movement in touch and criticized the assumption of what he called ‘temporal atomism’ in regard to touch. In the section entitled ‘One’s own body as a tactual object’ in the World of Touch, Katz makes note of the distinction between the objective and subjective poles of such experience, the motionless part of the body generally being experienced as the object. But the subjective experience associated with either pole may stand out as a whole and, through attentional effort, one can also make both tactile experiences equally present. Near the end of the section Katz remarks: I have found that the greatest difficulties occur in analyzing those double impressions that are obtained when the fingers of one hand touch the same fingers on the other hand, or when the fingers of one hand oppose each other and thus mutually touch. Katz, unlike Husserl, does not appear to have a clear analysis of what happens when the fingers touch each other. Both Katz and Merleau-Ponty maintain that movement is as essential to touch as light is to vision. Movement is, as it were, the medium of touch. Merleau-Ponty relies heavily on Katz’s study in his discussion of touch in PP (see esp. 315–17; Fr. 366–8). For instance, Merleau-Ponty draws on Katz to support the claim that temporality is an integral aspect of touching.


57

Not only must the fingers be moved over a surface in objective time, but the temporal extension of the touched sensation is an important feature in our sense of the spatial continuity of the surface. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Movement and time are not only an objective condition of knowing touch, but a phenomenal component of tactile data’ (des donnés tactiles) (PP 315, EN 364). Katz particularly emphasized the role of the hand and the range and complexity of its various modalities of touching, stroking, grasping, poking, rubbing, and so on. Katz also distinguished the sense of something vibrating and the sense of pressure. And Merleau-Ponty, following Katz, emphasizes the hand as a tool for exploring space. However, as Merleau-Ponty says, it is not strictly speaking the hand which touches but the whole body. Nevertheless, a point Husserl and Edith Stein both make, there is a sense in which I keep the sense of touch at a distance from myself: ‘It is not I who touch, it is my body’ (PP 316, 365). In contrast to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the parallels and continuities between touch and vision which are more usually contrasted in regard to constituting the sense of materiality and spatiality. For instance, it is often thought that the sense of touch disappears when one lifts one’s hand off one kind of surface before touching another. Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, thinks that a kind of indefinite sense of touch remains. It is not, he says, ‘a tactile nothingness’ but ‘a tactile space devoid of matter, a tactile background’ (PP 316, Fr. 365). Similarly, for both Katz and Merleau-Ponty, a tactile memory lingers. When I touch the surface of a material (for example, silk or fur), I have a sense of what that surface feels like and I will expect that sense in future contacts with the material. There is a kind of ‘memory’ in my body for what it feels like to lean against a wall, to have my back touching a chair, and so on. Through this memory I gain a sense of the ‘constancy’ of the object (PP 317, Fr. 366). Katz distinguishes between the subjective (I feel my finger being pricked) and the objective (I am touching something sharp) dimensions of touch (and sight), and believes this varies in different experiences. Normally, one is oriented to the objective but, in the case of pain for instance, the subjective predominates. Touching a surface with gloved fingers still gives an impression of a surface outside the glove. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the manner in which touch brings body and world literally into contact with one each other, unlike the situation of sight, which gives me the sense that I am ‘everywhere and nowhere’: Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of the body; we cannot unfold it before us and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world. (PP 316, Fr. 365)

58

Dermot Moran

Sartre and the ‘double sensation’ As we have seen, Sartre clearly distinguishes between my body as it is experienced (ambiguously and non-objectively) by me and the body as it is for the other or even for myself but now occupying the perspective of another. These different ‘bodies’ are in opposition and in fact are, for Sartre, irreconcilable. That two different views of the body are incompatible is reinforced by Sartre in his discussion of the phenomenon of the double sensation. Sartre claims that this phenomenon is not essential to my embodiment, for it is contingent.49 It can be inhibited or entirely removed through morphine making my leg numb and insensitive to being touched. The anaesthetized leg is not the same leg which belongs to my possibility of walking, running, playing football, and so on. To touch and be touched belong to different orders of reality according to Sartre, and it is philosophically pernicious to conflate these different ‘orders’ or ‘levels’ of being.50 When one hand touches the other, I directly experience the hand that is being touched first. It is only with a certain reflection that I can focus on the sensation in the touching hand. Sartre maintains that this constitutes ontological proof that the ‘bodyfor-me’ and the ‘body-for-the-other’ are different intentional objectivities. Sartre is challenging fundamental aspects of Husserl’s account, which is focused on the sensational ‘matter’ involved in perception and the differences between seeing and touching. Sartre, on the other hand, sees the ‘double sensation’ as a misleading phenomenon, which occludes the true ontological situation of the different phenomenological bodies. Furthermore, Sartre departs from Husserl in not thinking that vision and touch differ in regard to this doubling. The seeing is not the same as the object seen, for Sartre, and indeed, the two are incomparable dimensions of being. Moreover, for Sartre, mutual sensing cannot take place simultaneously and can be frustrated by an anaesthetic. This ‘double sensation’ is not an essential characteristic of embodiment. Interestingly, in the later Merleau-Ponty there is an effort to develop a more metaphysical or indeed ontological approach, an attempt to overcome traditional dualisms in philosophy and to project the ‘flesh’ as the ambiguous and unitary first principle, an ‘element’ (in the sense of the four elements) of being (VI 139). Merleau-Ponty writes: If we can show that the flesh is an ultimate notion, that it is not the union or compound of two substances, but thinkable by itself, if there is a relation of the visible to itself that traverses me and constitutes me as seer, this circle which I do not form, which forms me, this coiling over of the visible upon the visible, can traverse animate bodies as well as my own. (VI 140) In his famous chapter on ‘The intertwining – the chiasm’ in VI, MerleauPonty tries to articulate that phenomenological sense in which we find


59

ourselves as perceivers in a world of the visible. The visible seems to have its own ‘in itself’ character: ‘The visible about us seems to rest in itself’ (VI 130), yet we form part of it. We do not have any sense that we create the visible, yet we ourselves are visible within this sphere of visibility: ‘my seeing body subtends my visible body, and all the visibles with it’ (VI 138). Merleau-Ponty’s answer is to try to express this ‘intertwining’ of visible and vision which for him is at the heart of the notion of flesh and at the heart of the body–world relation. Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical use of the double sensation, however, is the opposite of Sartre’s. Merleau-Ponty wants to claim, paradoxically and counter-intuitively, that both vision and touch have this doubleness. This is a very important point. Seeing our body is a way of orienting to other things in a visible way. My particular orientation is contingent but there must be some orientation in my ‘upsurge’ in the world.

Conclusion Sartre’s account of the body is subtle, complex and many-layered. Although he is often criticized for his metaphysical claims concerning the gulf between different orders of being (for-itself and in-itself ), in fact his phenomenological account of the body cuts across this crude ‘Cartesian’ dualism and promotes the inseparability of embodied-being-in-the-world. Sartre invites confusion by using the term ‘ontology’, but in fact he is speaking about matters as they are phenomenologically manifest. Sartre’s account of the body is not as deeply informed by psychological studies as Merleau-Ponty’s,51 but in some respects his account of intersubjective embodied relations (shame, desire, the erotic caress) is more concrete and dynamic. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre disagree to a certain extent about the role of our self-perceivings. Whereas Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, emphasizes the ineliminability of the felt body in all perceiving, Sartre maintains that our perceivings objectify what we perceive. Hence, for Sartre, the phenomenon of ‘double sensation’ or ‘touching-touched’ is contingent, irrelevant and indeed falsely described in psychology. For Sartre, the ability to touch oneself or see oneself is a merely contingent feature of our animality and cannot provide ‘the foundation of a study of corporeality’ (BN 358, EN 426), whereas for Merleau-Ponty, especially in his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, following Husserl, it becomes the very essence of flesh and our ‘entwinement’ (l’entrelacement) in the world.

Notes 1. Of course, one should not assume that everything Sartre says about the body is to be found in the chapter bearing that title. In fact, the body pervades the whole of Being and Nothingness. In particular, the discussion of hunger and desire

60

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Dermot Moran (for instance, in the chapter on ‘Concrete Relations with Others’) continues the analysis of the experience of one’s own body and of the fleshly presence of the other. For recent Sartre studies that include discussion of his treatment of the body, see K. J. Morris 2008 and Wider 1997; see also Mui (this volume). Earlier discussions include Monasterio 1980, P. S. Morris 1976; Catalano 1974. Sartre was familiar with Husserl’s published works, especially Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, Formal and Transcendental Logic and Cartesian Meditations, but it is highly unlikely that he had read Husserl’s Ideas II, although he presumably learned about it from conversations with Merleau-Ponty, who had read a typescript of the work in the Husserl archives in Leuven in 1939. Similarly, Sartre does not appear to know the Crisis essays, which had been published in an obscure journal, Philosophia, edited in Belgrade, in 1936. In fact, Sartre is remarkable for his ability to reconstruct Husserl’s position successfully on the basis of little direct familiarity with Husserl’s primary texts. Sartre’s discussion of the role of the image in imagination and memory (for instance, in The Psychology of Imagination 1940) has to be distilled from scattered remarks found in Logical Investigations and Ideas I rather than based on the material subsequently published in the Husserliana series and recently translated as Husserl 2005. Sartre obviously also learned a great deal about Husserl and the phenomenological approach to the lived body from his reading of Max Scheler. For instance, at BN 330; EN 395, Sartre discusses Scheler’s distinction between the pain of a toothache and the intention toward it (wishing it would end, rejecting it, accepting it with resignation, and so on). For an interesting survey of the role of the body in Scheler’s writings, see VallegaNeu 2004. Of course, the body as such is hardly made thematic by Heidegger in Being and Time. For an interesting discussion, see Levin 1999. Nevertheless, Sartre takes his concept of facticity from Heidegger and also discusses the practical encounter with tools and use-objects in a typically Heideggerian way. Heidegger’s description of how the friend one encounters on the street is closer than the feeling of one’s feet walking would also be confirmed by Sartre (Heidegger 1962 §23: 141; German 107). Husserl 1989, hereafter ‘Ideas II’. Sartre, of course, read Husserl’s published writings, but had little access to the unpublished drafts, except through conversation with his close friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was receiving material from Herman Leo Van Breda, Director of the Husserl Archives in Leuven even during the German occupation. See Van Breda 2007. Especially in his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia; see Hoffman 1986 and 2002. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80) took holy orders at Saint-Sulpice in Paris and became abbé de Mureau; much of his life was devoted to philosophy. He was strongly influenced by John Locke’s empiricism, but in his best-known work, the Traité des sensations (1754), he went beyond Locke by positing not two sources of ideas (sensation and reflection) but just one: sensation. In a remarkably modern thought experiment, he asked the reader to imagine a marble statue endowed with only one sense-modality at a time; Condillac tried to show that all the mental faculties (judgement, volition, attention, memory, and so on) could come about from any one of the five senses. The sense of touch is of particular importance in giving rise to the idea of external objects, since when the statue touches


9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

61

itself, it simultaneously feels itself touching and being touched, but when it touches things other than itself, it does not have that ‘double sensation’. See Le Roy 1937 and O’Neal 1996. François-Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) was a dilettante philosopher and psychologist who published little in his lifetime but became known posthumously as a result of editions of his works published by Victor Cousin in 1834. He is best known for his treatise The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, tr. Margaret Donaldson Boehm (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, reprint of 1929) and his Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. He was initially influenced by the sensationalism of Condillac, but rejected it in favour of a view that the self knows itself through its inner self-apprehension and through the sensation of effort whereby it encounters resistance in the world as opposed to the Cartesian intellectual self-apprehension in the cogito. See Couailhac 1905 and Moore 1970. Sartre rejects Maine de Biran’s claim that a ‘sensation of effort’ exists (BN 304; EN 366). Sartre cites Comte’s ‘the eye cannot see itself’ at BN 316; EN 379. Bergson, esp. 1889, discusses the self in terms of its immediate experiences and the seamless unity of its complex parts. Maurice Pradines (1874–1958) was a French philosopher, a follower of Bergson, at Strasbourg, who taught Levinas, among others. See 1928 and 1932. The 1928 volume is a source listed by Merleau-Ponty in the bibliography to his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a narrow sensationalism, Pradines emphasized the intentionality of sensation as already a kind of intelligence; living things have an interest in what is apprehended. See Grappe 1949 and Guendouz 2003. Pradines distinguishes between the sense of need and the sense of defence in organisms and discusses the five senses under the heading of what he calls ‘sensoriality’. 1935; see Mui (this volume) for a discussion of Sartre and Marcel on the body. Toward the end of BN, Sartre comments on Bachelard 1938. Sartre also appears to have been inspired by his former teacher, the idealist Léon Brunschwicg (1869–1944); see Brunschwicg 1922 and 1927, both of which studies are also cited by Merleau-Ponty. Brunschwicg was particularly interested in Maine de Biran. On the ‘spiritualist’ tradition in French philosophy, see Gutting 2008. Prior to BN, Sartre published two studies on the imagination (1936 and 1940). For Sartre, as for Merleau-Ponty, the very notion of an objectified ‘sensation’ as found in traditional psychology is an ‘absurdity’ (cf. BN 314; EN 377). Sartre develops the notion of the ‘flesh’ (la chair) from Husserl’s conception of Leibhaftigkeit, the bodily presence of the object in perception. Indeed, Sartre already talks about the ‘flesh of the object in perception’ in earlier 1940 study, L’Imaginaire (15 of 1972 tr.). The French translation of ‘leibhaftig’ in Husserlian texts (as also cited by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas) is ‘en chair et en os’, meaning literally ‘in flesh and bone’. It is clear that Sartre genuinely experienced a kind of nausea in encounters with the body and with the external environment. These experiences are described in fictional form in Sartre 1938. Merleau-Ponty, too, frequently speaks of the ‘order of being’. The distinction between the ‘order of knowledge’ and the ‘order of being’ is frequently found in Scholasticism. Things as they are encountered first in knowing may not have ontological priority. See Dillon 1998, esp. 126. For a discussion of empathy in the phenomenological tradition, see Moran 2004.

62

Dermot Moran

23. Sartre refers to the body of the other person as a ‘psychic object’ (BN 393; EN 463). 24. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar claim about the inapprehensibility of my body in PP: ‘Insofar as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being “completely constituted” is that it is that by which there are objects’ (PP 92; Fr. 108). Here Merleau-Ponty is referring to Husserl’s claim in Ideas II that the body is always incompletely constituted. 25. Sartre frequently emphasizes that this body is immediately intuited. See, for instance, BN 357; EN 424 where Sartre speaks of the stomach as ‘present to intuition’. 26. Underscoring this theme, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body’ (PP 206; Fr. 239). 27. There is a vast literature on the manner in which anorexics relate to images of their own and others bodies (as shown in photographs), see, for instance, Smeets and Kosslyn 2001. 28. Stein 1917: 46 (tr. 42). 29. Of course, this experienced distance can become pathological as in those cases of body dysmorphic disorder where the person experiences part of his or her body as an alien adhesion. See, for example, Phillips 1996. 30. Sartre describes this feeling of distance from his hand very evocatively in Sartre 1938. 31. Paradoxical, because our immediate first-person experience of the body is not actually of the body but rather of the transcending of the body, its having been surpassed. 32. Sartre 1947: 32 (tr.: 4–5; repr.: 383). 33. Sartre 1947 repr.: 383. 34. For further analysis of Heidegger’s reading of intentionality as transcendence, see Moran 2000. 35. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of the ‘unmotivated upsurge’ (le jaillissement immotivé du monde) of the world in PP xiv (Fr. viii). 36. This is what Joseph Catalano calls the ‘world-making’ capacity of humans, in the essay reprinted in this volume. Catalano characterizes Sartre’s account as ‘anthropocentric’. 37. Sartre 1959: 49; Fr.: 94. 38. The claim that our experience is primarily world-oriented is now commonplace in much philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Recently, for instance, Prinz (2004) has argued that even emotional ‘bodily’ feelings do not have the body as their intentional object; rather, these feelings, although caused by bodily changes and felt ‘in’ the body, are primarily about significant events or objects in the world. As Prinz puts it, emotional bodily feelings register bodily changes but represent things going on outside the body. 39. For an interesting discussion of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the body, see Carman 1999. 40. The phenomenon of fingers touching each other or one hand touching the other is discussed by Weber and also by Wilhelm Wundt and others. There is also a mention of it in Titchener 1901: Vol. I: ‘Qualitative Experiments’, part 2: Instructor’s Manual §56, 383–4.


63

41. E. H. Weber (1795–1879) published two studies of touch (1834 and 1846). Weber and Gustav T. Fechner (1801–87) were founders of psychophysics, the attempt to systematically relate physical phenomena, for example, sound or weight, with the perception of them. Psychophysics can be considered the earliest form of experimental psychology in the modern sense. Weber carefully documented the different sensitivities to touch in various parts of the body, the perception of weight, heat, cold, and so on, and the ability of the perceiver to distinguish when being touched by two points of a compass at the same time. In Der Tastsinn (1846), for instance, Weber discusses the issue of whether two sensations arise when sensitive areas of the body touch each other. This is elaborated below. 42. Husserl 1973 §47, 137; Hua XVI 162. 43. For a general summary of nineteenth-century empirical psychological studies of touch (including discussions of Wundt, Weber, James, et al.), see Dresslar 1894. Dresslar discusses studies of the accuracy of space as revealed by active touch, the assessment of weights, and other typical themes of empirical research of the time. 44. For a good discussion of Husserl’s account of the body in Ideas II, see Welton 1999. 45. For a useful recent overview of the phenomenology of touch which discusses Merleau-Ponty’s hand-touching-hand scenario in the light of current analytic philosophy of mind, see Ratcliffe 2008. See also Paterson 2007, which contains a good review of classical and contemporary approaches to touch. For an eclectic set of studies on the concept of touch in different disciplines, see Classen ed. 2005. 46. David Katz (1884–1953) was born in Kassel and studied at Göttingen, where he was primarily a student of the extremely important experimental psychologist and psychophysicist and researcher on colour perception Georg Elias Müller (1850–1934), himself a student of Wilhelm Wundt. However, Katz also attended Husserl’s lectures and seminars, and Husserl was one of his doctoral thesis examiners in 1907. Katz continued to work on experimental and developmental psychology at Göttingen until 1919 when he moved to Rostok. He was close to the Gestalt psychologists, but was forced to leave Germany in 1933, first for England, until, in 1937, he took a position at the University of Stockholm where he remained. He was a major influence on J. J. Gibson; see his obituary (Arnheim 1954). See also Krueger 1982. 47. For Katz’s relations with Husserl, see Spiegelberg 1972: 42–4. Katz initially played down the influence of Husserl, although he acknowledged attending his lectures and seminars and learning the phenomenological method of unprejudiced description from him; see Katz’s autobiography (1952), esp. 194. Katz also acknowledges the influence of Scheler. 48. Weber 1996: 207. 49. Sartre’s account of the double sensation is rarely discussed, but see Murphy 2006: 491 and Welton 1999: 48. I believe Welton misses the originality in Sartre’s account. 50. See the interesting discussion by David Vessey, ‘The Body as Anstoss in Sartre’s Account of Constitution’. Paper presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy Boston, 1998. 51. Merleau-Ponty is deeply influenced, as we have seen, by Katz’s studies of vision and touch, and also by studies such as Lhermitte 1939, which introduces the idea of the ‘body image’ which Merleau-Ponty refers to as ‘le schéma corporel’

64

Dermot Moran (translated by Colin Smith as ‘body image’). For further discussion of this concept, see Gallagher 2005, who explains Merleau-Ponty’s ‘schéma corporel’ as the ‘dynamic functioning of the body in its environment’ (20).

References Arnheim, R. (1954). ‘David Katz, 1884–1953’. American Journal of Psychology, 66: 638–42. Bachelard, G. (1938). La psychoanalyse de feu. Paris: Gallimard. (English tr. G. C. Waterston: The Psychoanalysis of Fire. New York: Orion, 1969.) Bergson, H. (1889). Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience. (English tr. F. L. Pogson: Time and Free Will. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1913.) Brunschwicg, L. (1922). L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique. Paris: Alcan. Brunschwicg, L. (1927). Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. Paris: Alcan. Carman, T. (1999). ‘The body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’. Philosophical Topics, 27, 2: 205–26. Catalano, J. S. (1974). Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. New York: Harper & Row. (With new preface: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1980.) Chrétien, J-L. (2004). The Call and the Response. Tr. A. A. Davenport. New York: Fordham University Press. Classen, C., ed. (2005). The Book of Touch. Oxford and New York: Berg. Couailhac, M. (1905). Maine de Biran. Paris: Alcan. Dillon, M. C. (1998). ‘Sartre on the phenomenal body and Merleau-Ponty’s critique’. In Stewart, J., ed. The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 121–43. Dresslar, F. B. (1894). ‘Studies in the psychology of touch’. The American Journal of Psychology, 6, 3: 313–68. Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grappe, J. (1949). La genèse réciproque: Introduction à la psychologie de Maurice Pradines. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Guendouz, C. (2003). La philosophie de la sensation de Maurice Pradines. Espace et genèse de l’esprit. Paris: Georg Olms Verlag. Gutting, G. (2008). ‘French philosophy in the twentieth century’. In Moran, D., ed. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. London: Routledge, 814–48. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Trs John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). (Original German publication: Sein und Zeit. 17th edition, 1927. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993.) Hoffmann, P. (1986). ‘The unity of Descartes’s man’. Philosophical Review, 95: 339–70. Hoffmann, P. (2002). ‘Descartes’s theory of distinction’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64, 1: 57–78. Husserl, E. (1950ff). Husserliana. The Hague and Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer (abbreviated ‘Hua’ in this chapter). Husserl, E. (1973). Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, ed. Ulrich Claesges (Hua XVI). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (English tr. R. Rojcewicz: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, Collected Works VII. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.) Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Tr. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. (German publication: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen


65

Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, hrsg. Marly Biemel, Hua IV. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). Husserl, E. (2005). Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Tr. J. B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Katz, D. (1952). ‘Autobiography’. In E. Boring, ed., History of Psychology in Autobiography. New York: Russell & Russell, vol. 4, 189–211. Krueger, L. (1982). ‘Tactual perception in historical perspective: David Katz’s world of touch’. In Tactual Perception: A Sourcebook, eds. W. Schiff and Emerson Foulke. New York: Cambridge University Press. Le Roy, G. (1937). La psychologie de Condillac. Paris: Boivin. Levin, D. M. (1999). ‘The ontological dimension of embodiment: Heidegger’s thinking of being’. In Welton, D., ed., The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 122–49. Lhermitte, J. (1939). L’Image de notre corps. Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original French publication: Le Visible et l’invisible, texte établi par Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.) Monasterio, X. (1980). ‘The body in Being and Nothingness’. In H. J. Silverman and F. A. Elliston, eds. Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to his Philosophy. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Moore, F. C. T. (1970). The Psychology of Maine de Biran. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moran, D. (2000). ‘Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s accounts of intentionality’. Inquiry, 43, 1: 39–65. Moran, D. (2004). ‘The problem of empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein’. In Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy, eds T. A. Kelly and P. W. Rosemann. Peeters: Paris and Dudley, MA: Leuven, 269–312. Morris, K. J. (2008). Sartre. Oxford: Blackwell (Great Minds Series). Morris, P. S. (1976). Sartre’s Concept of a Person. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Murphy, A. (2006). ‘Sexuality’. In A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Neal, J. C. (1996). The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University. Paterson, M. (2007). The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford and New York: Berg. Phillips, K. A. (1996). The Broken Mirror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pradines, M. (1928). Philosophie de la sensation, Vol. I: Le problème de la sensation. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Pradines, M. (1932). Philosophie de la sensation, Vol. II: La sensibilité élémentaire. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Prinz, J. (2004). Gut Reactions. A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ratcliffe, M. J. (2008). ‘Touch and situatedness’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16, 3: 299–322. Sartre, J-P. (1936a) L’Imagination. Paris: Alcan. (English tr. F. Williams: Imagination. A Psychological Critique. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962.) Sartre, J-P. (1936b): ‘La transcendance de l’égo. Esquisse d’une déscription phénoménologique’. Recherches philosophiques, 6 : 85–123. Reprinted as a separate

66

Dermot Moran

book: La transcendance de l’égo. Paris: Vrin, 1966. (English trs. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. The Transcendence of the Ego. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957.) Sartre, J-P. (1938). La Nausée. Gallimard: Paris. (English tr. R. Baldick: Nausea. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.) Sartre, J-P. (1940) L’Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. (English tr. B. Frechtman: The Psychology of Imagination. London: Methuen, 1972. Retranslated by J. Webber: The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. London: Routledge, 2004.) Sartre, J-P. (1947). ‘Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité’. Situations I. Paris: Gallimard. (English tr. J. P. Fell: ‘Intentionality: a fundamental idea in Husserl’s philosophy’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1, 2: 4–5, 1970. Repr.: D. Moran and T. Mooney, eds. The Phenomenology Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.) Smeets, M. A. M. and Kosslyn, S. M. (2001). ‘Hemispheric differences in body image in anorexia nervosa’. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 29, 4: 409–16. Spiegelberg, H. (1972). Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stein, E. (1917). Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle. Reprinted: Munich: Gerhard Kaffke Verlag, 1980. (English tr. Waltraut Stein: On the Problem of Empathy: The Collected Works of Edith Stein Sister Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite 1891–1942, Volume III, third revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.) Titchener, E. B. (1901). Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice. New York and London: Macmillan (reprinted 1924). Vallega-Neu, D. (2004). ‘Driven spirit: the body in Max Scheler’s phenomenology’. Epoche, 9, 1: 43–58. (Reprinted in Vallega-Neu: The Bodily Dimension in Thinking. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005.) Van Breda, H. L. (2007). History of the Husserl-Archives. Dordrecht: Springer. Weber, E. H. (1834). De Tactu (1834). Tr. in Weber 1996. Weber, E. H. (1846). Tastsinn und Gemeingefühl. In R. Wagner, ed. Handwörterbuch der Physiologie [Pocket Dictionary of Physiology], Vol. III, Part 2, 481–588. Tr. in Weber 1996. Weber, E. H. (1996). E. H. Weber on the Tactile Senses. Eds. and trs. H. E. Ross and D. J. Murray, 2nd edition. Hove: Erlbaum/Taylor & Francis. Welton, D. (1999). ‘Soft, smooth hands: Husserl’s phenomenology of the lived-body’. In Welton, D., ed., The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 38–56. Wider, K. V. (1997). The Bodily Nature of Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

3 Sartre and the Lived Body: Negation, Non-Positional Self-Awareness and Hodological Space Adrian Mirvish

Sartre’s analysis of negation covers a number of complex phenomena and lies at the heart of his ontology. Crucially important, the choice of term is typically Sartrean: dramatic and insightful, but sometimes obscure. Moreover, the difficulty of trying to understand what is meant by ‘negation’ is compounded by the fact that it is closely tied in with what is said about nothingness. In fact, it seems to me that this double-barrelled negativity often gets commentators off on the wrong foot when they try to explain his idea. So, for instance, one writer notes that negation allows us to experience absence in a uniquely human fashion as lack or failure. Indeed, ‘it is because men are capable of being separated from the world that they are capable of having a language. The nature of the for-itself is such that it brings nothingness and hence negation and all that follows from it into the world.’1 Besides making a major assumption about the genesis of language, we are not told what precisely is meant by nothingness and why negation follows from it. In addition, it is never established that negation is, ontologically, first and foremost a manifestation of lack. And even if this were true, what is the precise mechanism that allows consciousness to experience lack as such? This question too is never answered. To explain negation, a second group of critics relies on being able to hone the reader’s philosophical sense or intuition. One gains some deepened insight for what Sartre wishes to convey, although what exactly he means is not made explicit as such. For example, Flynn writes that ‘freedom as nihilation and nonself-identity constitutes the ontological basis for Sartre’s claim that consciousness is “empty” . . . and likewise is the immediate implication of the basic thesis that consciousness is the internal negation of the nonconscious, that it is a no-thingness.’2 Using freedom to explain consciousness as not being identical with itself, while at the same time it nihilates or negates the in-itself, is helpful. It gives us an intuitive sense of what consciousness’s activity is like, but the actual mechanism at work is not explained further. 67

68

Adrian Mirvish

Essentially in the same exegetical vein, Lévy cites Sartre writing, contra Hegel, that the in-itself or ‘being is and [consciousness as] nothingness is not . . . ’3 Moreover, were the former to disappear, this would entail the disappearance of the latter as well. Yet at the same time, at its inception, Being and Nothingness4 is said to be almost a type ‘of pastiche of Hegel’s manner, on which [Sartre] defined “human reality” as the “unachieved totality of negations” in so far . . . as it “reaches beyond a concrete negation which it has to be as actual presence to being” ’.5 Lévy thus shows Sartre to be an intellectual agitateur par excellence, moving in ways both pro and contra Hegel. On one hand, he uses Hegel’s ideas of the for-itself and the in-itself – although now modified – to deny idealism and affirm a type of realism. On the other hand, he shows how consciousness moves towards its projects, at least partially, via the concrete negation by which it denies or negates the concrete circumstances in which it finds itself. Thus our intuitive sense of the text is deepened; we see how the concrete negation serves as a catalyst – or one could even say a type of antithesis – to move us toward the completion of our ongoing projects, although it is now embedded in an ontology of realism. But what exact mechanisms of consciousness are involved in this process we are never told. Part of the problem of understanding the idea of negation, and how it is connected to the phenomenon of non-positional or non-explicit selfawareness, is due to the fact that Sartre makes extensive use of Gestalt theory in his analyses. However, unless the reader comes to the text with a prior knowledge of this material it is easy to overlook the significance of what he has to say. In what follows, therefore, I will discuss briefly a number of principles of Gestalt theory and then show how Sartre makes use of these in developing his notion of negation.6 As a first point, an object for the Gestaltists is individuated due to our ability to group off a so-called figure against a ground, where this groupingoff process is said not to be learnt but natural.7 In addition, the differentiated figure always appears in relation to a less differentiated background. Köhler writes that ‘the solid quality [has] the name “figure character” [while] . . . the looseness of the environment [is called] the “ground character” ’.8 Second, the figure is not given piecemeal but rather all at once. To illustrate these points note the well-known example shown in Figure 3.1.9 This case shows two possible figure–ground configurations. In the first, the figure is a vase and the white area its ground, while in the second the figure consists of two faces in profile with the black area serving as ground. In both instances, the figure is clearly delineated while the ground is undifferentiated relative to it. Moreover, concentrating on the ground is usually sufficient to bring what was a previously undifferentiated figure spontaneously into focus, while the former figure recedes into the new, undifferentiated ground. In addition, only the vase or the faces can be seen as figure at any one

Negation, Self-awareness, and Hodological Space

Figure 3.1

69

Illustration of figure/ground ambiguity

time: there is an all-or-nothing, flip-flop switch in moving from one figure to another. To substantiate the claim that the grouping off of a figure is a natural process, one not due to learning, Köhler describes the reaction of congenitally blind adults who have just gained their sight: When during the first post-operational tests the patient is shown an object which he knows by touch from previous life, he can seldom give a satisfactory response . . . Still . . . when asked about ‘that thing’ . . . before him, he understands the question. Obviously, he has before him a specific entity . . . which he tries to name . . . Elementary visual organization seems to be given to him at once.10 That is, a figure is spontaneously grouped off by the subject; no learning is involved in the ability to individuate entities of the sort noted above in the visual field.11 Or, for example, constellations such as Cassiopeia and the

70

Adrian Mirvish

Dipper have been consistently identified over time by different cultures. ‘For ages people have seen the same group as units,’12 says Köhler, again emphasizing the claim that a figure is given spontaneously, and that our ability to segregate it from its ground is a natural and not a learned process. To show how these Gestalt principles are endorsed by Sartre,13 we can start with the basic figure–ground distinction: The . . . fundamental relation of the totality and the ‘this’ is at the source of the relation that ‘Gestalt theory’ has brought to light as existing between the ground and the form. The ‘this’ always appears on a ground, i.e. on the undifferentiated totality of being . . . (BN 182, EN 231) Notebooks for an Ethics14 makes a similar point: ‘I unveil a being against the background of undifferentiation. And this unveiling does not keep it from falling back into the shadows’ (NE 485, Fr. 501). That is, the figure becomes part of the ground again, once I turn my attention away from it. Similarly, Sartre notes that ‘in perception there is always the construction of a figure on a ground. No one object, no group of objects is especially designed to be organized as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction of my attention’ (BN 9, EN 44). In addition, Sartre endorses the all-or-nothing phenomenon during which the genesis of a new figure results in the disappearance of the one preceding it: ‘all the thises cannot appear at once on the ground of the world and . . . the appearance of certain among them results in the fusion of certain others with the ground . . . ’ (BN 317, EN 380). As regards the Gestalt principle that a figure is given all at once and without learning, Sartre writes that ‘an object must always appear to me all at once . . . [although] always . . . in a particular perspective which expresses its relations to the ground of the world and other thises’ (BN 317, EN 380; emphasis in original). In fact, when experiencing the Other we are told that my consciousness ‘has to be itself and spontaneously this not-being [i.e. the other] . . . ’ (BN 283, EN 343). My initial experience of this alterity is not dependent on learning or on some inferential process. Instead, I immediately grasp him or her as a totality.15 Bearing this in mind we can now turn to what Sartre has to say about negation. First, he distinguishes between so-called internal and external negations. Regarding the latter, we are told that if ‘I say of an inkwell that it is not a bird, the inkwell and the bird remain untouched by the negation. This is an external relation which can be established only by a human reality acting as witness’ (BN 86, EN 129). The external negation, therefore, merely allows an agent to judge that objects already existing in his perceptual field are different from each other. Ontologically, it neither adds nor subtracts anything from the experience overall:


71

The negation stands as a categorical and ideal connection which I establish between [objects] without modifying . . . enriching . . . or impoverishing them with the slightest quality . . . As it serves neither to enrich them nor to constitute them, it remains strictly external. (BN 86, EN 129) By contrast, consider the internal negation where we understand a relation between two beings such that the one which is denied of the other qualifies the other by its very absence . . . The negation becomes then a bond of essential being since at least one of the beings on which it depends is such that it points toward the other . . . it carries the other in its heart as an absence. (BN 175, EN 223) Sartre continues his analysis by noting how the internal negation needs to be subdivided into the concrete and radical negations. He writes of the former: The ‘this’ is the being which I at present am not, in so far as it appears on the ground of the totality of being. This is what . . . is revealed on the undifferentiated ground of being, to make known to me the concrete negation which I have to be on the totalizing ground of my negations. (BN 182, EN 231) This description is clearly couched in Gestalt terms: ‘this’ is the figure that, via the concrete negation, is grouped off from its ground, that is, from ‘the undifferentiated ground of being’. This emphasis on the concrete negation as the process by which consciousness differentiates a distinct, delineated figure from its undifferentiated ground is again emphasized when Sartre tells us that ‘The revelation of the this supposes that the “accent is put” on a certain negation accompanied by the withdrawal of the other [thises] in the syncretic disappearance into the ground . . . ’ (BN 182, EN 231). Regarding the internal negation, Sartre – again in expressly Gestalt terms – writes: The ‘this’ always appears on a ground; that is, on the undifferentiated totality of being inasmuch as the For-itself is the radical and syncretic negation of it. Yet it can always dissolve again into this undifferentiated totality when another ‘this’ arises . . . the appearance of the ‘this’ or of the figure on the ground . . . is the correlate of my own concrete negation on the syncretic ground of a radical negation . . . (BN 182, EN 231)

72

Adrian Mirvish

We are also told that a figure, delineated by a concrete negation, ‘remains ready to dissolve in the radical negation at the upsurge of another “this” . . . the “this” is revealed as “this” by a “withdrawal into the ground of the world” on the part of all the other “thises” . . . ’ (BN 183, EN 232). There is therefore a sharp tension between the figure grouped off by a concrete negation, and the ground or world which is a product of the radical negation. The ground is necessary for the figure’s existence but it always slips away from direct apprehension. Taxonomically, matters are therefore clear: as opposed to the external negation, which separates and categorizes one already existent entity from another in constitution, the internal negation constitutes the way in which consciousness actually delineates its experience. The internal negation is divided into the concrete and radical negations, with the former serving as the Gestalt grouping that gives rise to a figure, while the radical negation is the mechanism which delineates the undifferentiated ground of the subject’s experience. Sartre also writes that ‘[w]e should not conceive of [the internal] negation as a type of judgement . . . ’ (BN 174, EN 222). But this implies that both concrete and radical negations perform their respective grouping operations spontaneously, which is precisely what characterizes Gestalt groupings, emphasizing all the more how the negations are meant to be understood in a specifically Gestaltist context. There is nothing obscure with the observation that the concrete negation groups off a clearly delineated figure from its ground. But what exactly occurs with the radical negation? What is the cash value of saying that I can experience a radical negation since by very definition its product is undifferentiated? Indeed, as we have seen, were I to turn my attention specifically to this ground, it would lose its undifferentiated characteristic and become a figure. Although it may at first seem strange to try to pinpoint what is inchoate, Sartre nevertheless places considerable emphasis on human experience overall being dependent on this type of negation. So, for instance, elaborating on the famous keyhole case: suppose I suddenly feel that there is someone looking at me and I wheel round, only to discover that I have made a mistake. Yet though no one is present: I shall feel my heart beat fast, and I shall be alert for the slightest noise . . . Far from having disappeared with my first alarm the Other is present everywhere, below me, above me, in the neighboring rooms . . . I do not cease to experience my being-for-the-other . . . (BN 277, EN 336–7) What mechanism is there to explain this uneasy experience of my beingfor-the-Other? Obviously, it is not the concrete negation, since this is what groups off a specific figure, whereas here the aorist other is experientially


73

everywhere. Notice, though, that precisely by virtue of being everywhere the other is constantly in the ground of my experience. The other is behind, below or above any particular figure I happen to focus on at a given moment, but in an indefinite mode. That is, this other’s presence is diffuse or undifferentiated. But this is to say that here the radical negation delineates my perception of the other’s undifferentiated presence as part of the ground of my experience. The point can also be made for The Divided Self, a book written from a distinctly Sartrean point of view, when R. D. Laing describes the attempt of a twelve-year-old to deal with her anxiety: I . . . had to walk to my father’s shop through a large park which was . . . long . . . It struck me that if I stared long enough at the environment that I would blend with it and disappear . . . Then, you are scared of [this game] because it begins to come on without encouragement. I would just be walking along and felt that I had blended with the landscape.16 When the young girl starts to feel as though she has blended – that is, with an undifferentiated part of the landscape – she is using the radical negation against her own identity, which becomes diffuse or undifferentiated. In addition, to extrapolate further, who is it that she is trying to be invisible from? The answer is presumably the same as that given by Sartre above, viz. the aorist Other, experienced as being everywhere; even when the girl might wheel round only to find no one literally present. Sartre is thus clearly indebted to the Gestaltists for his analysis of constitution. For the observations that these psychologists have made about perception have enabled Sartre to describe the way in which consciousness delineates experience via the internal negation, the concrete negation differentiating a figure and the radical negation generating its ground. It must be emphasized that these experiences described by Sartre are clearly functions of an embodied consciousness. There is no anti-substantial, conscious process, qua for-itself, moving via negation beyond the constraints of the material in-itself, a dualistic picture all too common in the literature.17 Instead, we have to deal with conscious experience emanating from the body as an intentional locus. To explain in turn how this can occur, we need to see how Sartre places classic, Gestalt views in the broader context of the psychologist Kurt Lewin’s view of hodological space.18 In BN Sartre writes that ‘[t]he real space of the world is the space that Lewin calls “hodological”’ (BN 308, EN 370) and that ‘[t]he space which is originally revealed to me is hodological space’ (BN 322, EN 386).19 Lewin developed this view of space to explain the dynamic relation which usually obtains between an agent and its environment. Specifically, the individual is analysed in terms of goal-directed activity through which he or she delineates a world. Lewin points out that objects functioning as goals or ‘valences’

74

Adrian Mirvish

are either positive, in which case the agent is attracted to them, or negative, in which case they function as entities to be avoided. For example, by the age of six months a rattle suspended above a baby’s crib may lead him to extend his hands, feet and head together in a coordinated movement toward it.20 As an example of a negative valence, think of a child who has learnt to crawl away from a dog usually unfriendly to it. Lewin also stresses that in an everyday context objects are not conceived of as material entities intellectually apprehended in a fixed space. Instead, they are used functionally, as tools or utensils.21 In the process of moving to or away from valences, paths or ‘vectors’ are traced out, a function of direction and strength on the subject’s part. Moreover, valences constantly change in value or even move out of focus altogether as they shift from figure to ground depending on the subject’s needs. That is, vectors are constantly generated by the subject relative to changing valences. These valences and vectors create what Lewin calls a ‘field of force’ so that the normal subject generates a constantly fluctuating field of force during the course of interacting with his environment. In NE Sartre talks about hodological space in the following terms: ‘Originally, space is a qualitative . . . field, because it is traversed, because one pursues there, because one flees there, and one is always on the plane . . . of the unveiling of the new’ (NE 361, Fr. 375). What this material shows is that instead of there being fixed sets of coordinates, as with Euclidean space, the hodological frame of reference is generated relative to each subject and is generally fluid. That is, a space or measure is generated relative to an embodied consciousness whose field of force fluctuates constantly. The idea of hodological space allows Sartre to show how a subject as an embodied agent generating a space is not merely an anatomical entity possessing clearly delineable boundaries. To the contrary, on a hodological model one is coextensive with one’s range of possibilities and field of force. This is why, specifically, Sartre writes that ‘[m]y body is everywhere . . . [it] always extends across the tool which it utilizes . . . it is at the end of the cane on which I lean . . . it is at the end of the telescope which shows one the stars; it is . . . my adaptation to these tools’ (BN 325, EN 389). That is, when considered as an intentional agent, embodied consciousness, far from being bounded anatomically, must instead be understood as extending as far as the scope of its field of force. This view of active, goal-seeking, embodied consciousness is what Sartre terms a Leib or ‘lived body’22 (BN 324, EN 388–9). Returning to the example of the aorist other, when Sartre writes that ‘[f]ar from having disappeared with my first alarm the Other is present everywhere, below me, above me . . . and I continue to profoundly feel my being-for-the-other . . . ’, what he is describing, in hodological terms, is my field of force. Unlike the classic keyhole case where my field of force actually implodes under the look of the other,23 it wavers or is threatened in this


75

particular case. In addition, it can now be said that I delineate my field of force via the radical negation to the extent that it remains undifferentiated or inchoate. Moreover, this experience occurs pre-reflectively, for were I to reflect expressly on my circumstances, the undifferentiated ground of my experience would have to shift into focus as a differentiated set of figures. Notice also that in this example Sartre has stressed an experience involving the boundaries of a field of force. Yet at the same time I must also as a lived body maintain an orientation to my surroundings. I do not slip and slide, nor do I collapse onto the floor. Instead, I remain tense, ready to spring or react should the threatening, aorist other actually materialize. However, this bodily awareness remains at an undifferentiated or inchoate level of pre-reflective consciousness. In the same vein, think of a highly proficient tennis player whose focus at any given moment is on the ball. His or her skills can be maintained only in so far as the player also maintains a very precise, dynamic, corporeal or kinaesthetic orientation to the surroundings. But this orientation must remain in the ground of the player’s experience, that is, it must remain undifferentiated. Were the player to become aware of his or her body moving around the court rather than concentrating on the ball as such, the game would surely be lost.24 Sartre’s thought is typically nuanced and perspicacious when it comes to dealing with this type of indirect or undifferentiated sense of lived-body self-awareness. For example, in NE he describes a case in which, acting authentically, I spontaneously extend my hand in order to help a passerby onto the back of an open bus platform (NE 285–7, Fr. 297–300). Here my focus is on the outstretched hand of the other who is running after the bus, that is, my focus is on the hand as figure, which I differentiate via the concrete negation. At one and the same time, however, Sartre emphasizes that it is crucial how I orient myself to the situation as a lived body. So, to elaborate, it is going to make a difference whether I brace myself in order to grab the hand of a thin teenager as opposed to that of a professional football player.25 As with the above examples, this orientation as a lived body forms an integral part of the experience overall, although it remains inchoate, or undifferentiated, in the ground of my experience. In Sartre’s terms, bodily self-awareness remains in the ground of my experience, given inchoately via the radical negation. Similarly, Iron in the Soul describes how the previously indecisive Mathieu ends his life authentically fighting the Nazis. Holed up in a bell tower, he is the last of his small group of compatriots to survive. When to the bitter end he continues to fire down on the enemy, Sartre is well able to capture not only Mathieu’s state of (embodied) mind, but also the way in which this character orients himself to his surroundings. Mathieu’s focus is on those Germans on the ground that he is trying to kill, that is, he delineates these figures via the concrete negation. However, as an integral part of the experience overall Sartre also emphasizes Mathieu’s bodily orientation to his cramped, terminal environment.26 This undifferentiated, embodied

76

Adrian Mirvish

awareness is vital to the extent that Mathieu is able to act efficaciously as a soldier, but it is given to him as part of the ground of his experience via the radical negation. Sartre uses the terms ‘non-positional’ or ‘non-thetic’ rather than ‘undifferentiated’ (see BN 330–1, EN 394–5), so we can summarize by saying that X’s experience of a valence or figure is given via a concrete negation, whereas the experience of X’s field of force acting as context for this figure is generated via the radical negation. But this balanced tension necessarily entails that, as a focused and lived body, X maintains a correlative but undifferentiated – that is, non-positional or non-thetic – self-awareness relative to his or her environment.27 Up to this point what has been dealt with are the cognitive and kinaesthetic aspects of the concrete and radical negations. However, bearing in mind Sartre’s exhortation in The Psychology of Imagination that it is artificial to separate cognition, kinaesthesia, and emotion, it should now also be shown how affect forms an integral part of the experience of a field of force for both types of negation. So, Sartre writes that: consider such expressions as ‘I am not rich’ or ‘I am not handsome’ . . . When I say, ‘I am not handsome,’ I do not limit myself to denying . . . a certain virtue which due to this fact passes into nothingness while I keep intact the positive totality of my being. [Instead] I intend to indicate that ‘not being handsome,’ is a certain negative virtue of my being . . . it is a real quality of myself . . . and this negative quality will explain my melancholy as well as, for example, my failures in the world. (BN 175, EN 223) In terms of the specific way in which lack is manifest, when I focus on the fact that I am not rich or handsome as an explicit object of consciousness, this experience is delineated via the concrete negation. However, since there can be no concrete negation without its radical counterpart, there must also be an affective ground to my experience, one delineated via the radical negation. So, focusing on the fact that ‘I am not handsome’ as figure will entail my concomitantly experiencing melancholy as part of the ground of my experience. Specifically, my field of force will manifest melancholy experienced in a non-positional or non-thetic mode. Or, recall Sartre’s case of authentic action, where I spontaneously extend my hand to the other running after the bus I am travelling on. Here, the ground of my experience is not only delineated in terms of my bracing to receive the weight of the other, but also in terms of encouragement, hope and excitement. All these emotions form part of my field of force, although they may exist as ground phenomena, which is to say I experience them, constituted via the radical negation, in a non-positional or non-thetic mode. What this shows in general, therefore, is that it would be wrong to think of such affective states,


77

experienced non-positionally, just as mental phenomena. Instead, helping to constitute my field of force, they form part of the ground of behaviour through which I orient myself, non-thetically or non-positionally, to the world. Thus by the ingenious use of Gestalt material and the idea of hodological space, Sartre can explain non-positional self-awareness in terms of embodied consciousness. Instead of having to rely on inexact ideas of the mind as nothingness – or associated views of critics which ultimately rely on explaining self-awareness in terms of reflection28 – non-positional self-awareness needs to be understood as forming part of the way in which, cognitively, affectively and kinaesthetically, I as a lived body orient to, and thereby help to constitute, a world via my field of force. Speaking generally, what the keyhole and bus cases emphasize, among many other similar examples of Sartre, is that, unlike Alain and Brunsvicg – intellectualist figures from the previous French philosophical generation who stressed ratiocination or reflection as being quintessentially human29 – Sartre the existentialist is at pains to propose a philosophical anthropology that describes and explains significant aspects of human existence in terms of the ontological priority of pre-reflective consciousness. The idea of non-positional self-awareness, plus the radical negation constituting the ground of the experience of my field of force, is also significant from a third-party point of view. Specifically, Sartre’s views can explain how others are able to react to me spontaneously or pre-reflectively. For instance, in No Exit Garçin becomes aware that he, Estelle and Inez, shut together in a room, each serves as torturer for the other two and so he pleads that they all stay on their respective couches without saying a word. Inez responds: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! . . . You’ve stolen [Estelle] from me . . . if she and I were alone do you suppose she’d treat me as she does? . . . even if I didn’t see her I’d feel it in my bones – that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress, for your benefit, throwing you smiles you didn’t see . . .30 Note that when Estelle directs her attention to Garçin, this need not necessarily always be in a thetic mode. The seductive rustling of her dress, her provocative smiles – these and like behaviour could quite as easily have been made non-thetically. In the play, Sartre makes it clear that Estelle’s selfesteem is inexorably tied to her being attractive to the opposite sex, so that the kind of behaviour in question forms part of both her non-thetic and thetic awareness of self. Moreover, the subject’s non-thetic self-awareness is absolutely fundamental in so far as it provides, psychologically speaking, a constant ground and affective context relative to which Estelle’s specific, thetic behaviours can take shape. And it is precisely Estelle’s nonthetic self-awareness – her obsessive orientation to the environment, which

78

Adrian Mirvish

characterizes her behaviour as that of an inveterate flirt – that Inez is immediately able to comprehend. But this means that instead of having to draw inferences about a so-called state of mind, Inez is able spontaneously to intuit Estelle’s non-thetic self-awareness precisely in so far as this is directly manifest through the latter’s somatic orientation to the world. It seems to me that part of Sartre’s perspicacity as a writer, when it comes to using vignettes to encapsulate someone’s character in a few lines, often lies precisely in his ability to describe behaviour associated with this kind of non-positional self-awareness. For instance, in The Age of Reason, Sartre talks about the artist Gomez, the husband of Mathieu’s friend Sarah, who suddenly leaves Paris, his wife and his son without warning, in order to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Gomez’s impulsiveness is contrasted with the indecision so typical of Mathieu: One day he [Gomez] had read of the fall of Irun, in Paris-Soir. He had paced up and down the studio for a long while, running his fingers through his black hair. And then he went out, bareheaded and without an overcoat, as though he was going to buy cigarettes at the Dôme. He had not returned. The room had remained exactly as he had left it: an unfinished canvas, a half-cut copperplate on the table . . .31 Here the reader is left to imagine what figures or valences formed Gomez’s direct objects of attention. By contrast, the description above deals with his behaviour as the pre-reflective, non-thetic correlate for such figures or valences. It is this behaviour that allows Gomez, as a lived body, to orient to the world as the ground of his experience. Moreover, the reader is able prereflectively to grasp something about his character from this pacing, from Gomez’s impulsive departure and from the fact that he abandons his family.32 So, in general, it can be said that Sartre’s insight about non-positional consciousness allows us to understand how we are able pre-reflectively to grasp or comprehend the other, not via the apprehension of his or her mind, but rather through the observation of an embodied, non-thetically constituted field of force. That is, what pre-reflectively allows X to intuit and assess Y characterologically is Y’s behaviour, manifest as a direct function of Y’s non-thetic self-awareness, and the radical negation that constitutes the ground or context for Y’s experience. In conclusion, given the way in which the terms ‘negation’, ‘nihilation’ and ‘for-itself’ are used in such close proximity, a Hegelian ambiance certainly pervades much of BN. Small wonder then that not only Lévy, but many other critics too, are led astray when it comes to the detailed analysis that Sartre gives for the idea of negation. So, why does he in fact insist on using the terminology he does? Here there are at least three possible reasons, the first of which is Sartre’s need to create some form of synthesis between his own existential views and the insights that Hegel can provide


79

regarding consciousness as a transcendent, constituting entity. The problem with this approach though is that Sartre’s analysis of negation has its conceptual basis in the empirical discoveries of Gestalt psychology, far from any grand, cosmic, idealistic scheme. In addition, the idea of consciousness that emerges consonant with this analysis entails that consciousness and embodiment are inseparable. Moreover, far from the exalted reaches of Hegelian pellucidity, the experience of consciousness overall for Sartre has to have undifferentiated, non-thetic self-awareness, involving an orientation of embodied consciousness to its material environment, as a necessary condition for its existence. Moreover, and also contra Hegel, Sartre is quite strident in BN about the need for philosophy to eschew speculative metaphysics and follow a phenomenological ontology instead.33 As a second reason for the use of the term ‘negation’ it is possible that given his penchant for the dramatic, his lack of concern with editorial minutiae and the fact that Jean Hippolyte was the intellectual rage in the period in question, Sartre went blithely ahead with the use of the terminology in question precisely in spite or because of its Hegelian overtones. As a third and final possibility, the point could be made that, psychoanalytically speaking, Sartre was deliberately misleading his readers. Here it will suffice to note an important childhood fantasy mentioned in The Words: I would work gropingly on my last book. People would say, with disappointment: ‘but it’s illegible!’ There would even be talk of throwing it into the garbage. Finally, the . . . Library would ask for it out of pure piety. It would lie there for hundreds of years, forgotten. And then, one day, out of love for me, young scholars would try to decipher it; their entire lifetime would not be enough to restore what would, of course, be my masterpiece.34 Which of these three possibilities is the correct one? Although not an issue that can be dealt with here, and any contradictory tendencies on Sartre’s part notwithstanding, I am inclined to accept a combination of all three. However, whatever the precise answer turns out to be, what this chapter has shown is that one must work carefully when dealing with Sartre’s texts, minimally in order not to misinterpret his truly original and profound analyses concerning the Gestalt-inspired view of negation, plus its associated idea of embodied consciousness.

Notes 1. Manser 1967: 55. 2. Flynn 1984: 7. 3. Lévy 2003: 427.

80

Adrian Mirvish

4. I have made some changes to the English translation. In what follows BN is cited first in the text followed by the French (EN). 5. Lévy 2003: 426. 6. It is important to note that Sartre also moves beyond the Gestaltists, synthesizing their insights about perception with ideas about consciousness and the body that he has developed from thinkers such as Max Scheler and Kurt Lewin. Sartre’s relation to Lewin is discussed in what follows. I have discussed Sartre’s relation to Scheler in Mirvish 1983. 7. This is certainly not to deny that learning plays an important role for the Gestaltists. The point rather is that the fundamental delineation or grouping off a figure from its ground occurs spontaneously and is not a result of judgement or inference, as the earlier introspectionist psychologists would have it. I have dealt with the methodology of the introspectionists and their relationship to Sartre in Mirvish 1980. For more on the introspectionists, see Mirvish 1995. 8. Köhler 1947: 202. 9. This illustration is taken from Katz 1950: 47. 10. Köhler 1947: 149–50. 11. What are being discussed here are universal groupings. There are other types of groupings, dependent upon culture, where learning clearly enters into the ability to group a figure off from a ground. 12. Köhler 1947: 141. 13. It should be emphasized that what Sartre borrows from the Gestaltists is their phenomenological data and not their ontology. Indeed, Sartre would reject their sometimes substantialist views of consciousness. See, for example, Köhler 1947: ch. 4. See also ‘On the Phenomenological Method’, in Koffka 1963: 73. In the same light Sartre would reject the gestalt idea of isomorphism. 14. Sartre 1992 (hereafter NE). I have made some changes to the English translation. In what follows NE is cited first in the text followed by the French. 15. Again, it must be stressed that learning obviously does enter into the Gestalt model of perception and experience. However, the fundamental delineation of a figure from a ground is given spontaneously, without learning. This forms the basis on which learning and culture as constitutive elements are added. I have discussed how the (embodied) for-itself apprehends the other spontaneously in Mirvish 1984, 1988–9 and 1996a. 16. Laing 1960: 110. 17. See, for example, Hartmann 1966. See also Fell 1979. 18. Lewin started off as a Gestalt psychologist. I fully discuss his views of hodological space in Mirvish 1996b. See also Mirvish 1983. 19. My emphasis on ‘originally’. See also Sartre 1972: 251 (Fr. 335). 20. Lewin 1935: 81–2. 21. I discuss this issue fully in Mirvish 2001. 22. I discuss Sartre’s view of lived body and how this has been influenced by Max Scheler (and Lewin) in Mirvish 1983. 23. See Mirvish 1984 and 1988–9. 24. Strictly speaking, there is a difference between the two examples. In the tennis case, the ball given via a concrete negation functions as a figure or positive valence for the player, whereas when I wheel round to find no one, emphasis is


25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

81

on the radical negation. The idea of a bodily orientation to one’s environment though remains the same for both cases. I discuss this issue fully in Mirvish 1996 and 2002. Sartre 1978: 223–5, Fr. 191–3. When it comes to non-positional self-awareness, there are interesting limit cases. For instance, in a sensory deprivation tank thetic and non-thetic states of selfawareness sometimes become strangely fused. This type of case, however, need not concern us here. It seems to me that one of the best analyses in this category is that given by Wider (1991). Using the idea of distance to explain the role that nothingness and negation play in self-awareness, Wider writes that ‘for consciousness to be conscious of something, it must exist at a distance from what it is conscious of; therefore, for consciousness to be conscious of itself it must exist at a distance from itself’ (1991: 329). However, since consciousness is not a substance in any sense of the term, what is it that allows it to be separate from itself? ‘[W]hat separates [consciousness] from itself is itself, its reflexivity’ (Wider 1991: 329). Wider notes that what ‘is at work here is a notion of a latent awareness. [Self-awareness] only becomes activated, if at all, at the level of reflective consciousness’ (1991: 328). What could be characterized as this intellectualist interpretation of Sartre suffers from a number of problems. First, if consciousness can be activated so as to become reflective, this must mean that it has the potential to become such. But this implies the existence of some type of neo-Aristotelian theory of mind which runs contrary to Sartre’s claim that consciousness is nothingness. Second, struggling to deal with the idea of nothingness as a complete lack of distance, Wider ends up making use of a number of metaphors. For instance, we are told that ‘because consciousness is always implicitly self-aware, a subtle division occurs within it like a barely visible crack in the foundation of the building after an almost imperceptible earthquake’ (1991: 329). She also refers to Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit phenomenon: ‘[n]othing separates the duck from the rabbit. But a subtle disturbance infects the placid lines of the drawing, and what is one seems always on the verge of splitting. It is through this crack that nothingness seeps’ (1991: 329). However, to talk about consciousness as generating a barely visible crack, or for that matter as a phenomenon that allows nothingness to seep through the tension between two figures, is precisely to hypostatize consciousness. It makes of consciousness a nothingness-inducing entity – even if it is not a substance – which is exactly what Sartre would have wished to avoid. Concomitantly, and contra Sartre, it thereby turns ontology into speculative metaphysics. I discuss Sartre’s relation to Alain in Mirvish 1991. Sartre 1964a: 23. Sartre 1966: 49, Fr. 45. The point here is not that X can directly intuit Y’s private experience and subsequently therefore not make a mistake about Y’s character. This limitation notwithstanding, it is also possible that at one and the same time X can sometimes pre-reflectively grasp aspects of Y’s character that Y is himself unable to do. It is also important to notice here that Sartre deprecates the idea of character when he comes to discuss it explicitly from a philosophical point of view. This is scarcely surprising since generally, like the ego, character could easily denote a type of stasis that Sartre would automatically associate with bad faith. In fact,

82

Adrian Mirvish

especially as a writer Sartre relies heavily on the phenomenon of character. And in the case of individuals such as Hoederer, or Mathieu in the process of conversion, these characters can certainly be authentic. Indeed, without some consistency of character, how could authenticity even be possible? To go into this issue in detail would however take us beyond the scope of the present chapter. 33. So see BN 297, 603–4, 619–20. 34. Sartre 1964b: 128–9, Fr. 173.

References Fell, J. P. (1979). Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place. New York: Columbia University Press. Flynn, T. R. (1984). Sartre and Marxist Existentialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartmann, K. (1966). Sartre’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Katz, D. (1950). Gestalt Psychology. Tr. R. Tyson. New York: Ronald Press. Koffka, K. (1963). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (Original publication 1935.) Köhler, W. (1947). Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright. Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lévy, B.-H. (2003). Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Tr. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lewin, K. (1935). A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill. Manser, A. (1967). Sartre: A Philosophic Study. New York: Oxford University Press Mirvish, A. (1980). ‘Demystifying (part of) Being and Nothingness’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 11, 3. Mirvish, A. (1983). ‘Sartre on perception and the world’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 14, 14. Mirvish, A. (1984). ‘Sartre, hodological space, and the existence of others’. Research in Phenomenology 14, 149–73. Mirvish, A. (1988–9). ‘Childhood, subjectivity and hodological space: reconstructing Sartre’s view of existential psychoanalysis’. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 1–3. Mirvish, A. (1991). ‘Bad faith, good faith, and the faith of faith’. In A. Aronson and A. van den Hoven, eds. Sartre Alive. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Mirvish, A. (1995). ‘The presuppositions of Husserl’s presuppositionless philosophy’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24, 2. Mirvish, A. (1996a). ‘Sartre: the ontology of interpersonal relations, authenticity and childhood’. Man and World, 29: 19–41. Mirvish, A. (1996b). ‘Sartre and the problem of other (embodied) minds’. Sartre Studies International, 2. Mirvish, A. (2001). ‘Sartre on constitution: Gestalt theory, instrumentality and the overcoming of dualism’. Existentia, XI. Mirvish, A. (2002). ‘Sartre on the ego’. Continental Philosophy Review, 35, 2. Sartre, J-P. (1964a). No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage. Sartre, J-P. (1964b). The Words. Tr. B. Frechtman. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. (Original French publication: Les mots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.) Sartre, J-P. (1966). The Age of Reason. Tr. E. Sutton. New York: Knopf. (Original French publication: L’Age de raison. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.)


83

Sartre, J-P. (1972). The Psychology of Imagination. Tr. B. Frechtman. London: Methuen. (Original French publication: L’Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1940.) Sartre, J-P. (1978). Iron in the Soul Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original French publication: La Mort dans l’âme. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.) Sartre, J-P. (1992). Notebooks for an Ethics. Tr. D. Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. (Original French publication 1983.) Abbreviated NE in this chapter. Wider, K. V. (1991). ‘A nothing about which something can be said: Sartre and Wittgenstein on the self’. In A. Aronson and A. van den Hoven, eds. Sartre Alive. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

4 Sartre and Marcel on Embodiment: Re-evaluating Traditional and Gynocentric Feminisms Constance L. Mui

In recent years, the celebrated works of Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, once required readings in feminist philosophy courses, have come under rigorous attack by a new generation of feminist philosophers who ascribe to the position known as gynocentrism.1 Gynocentric feminists challenge the basic philosophical assumptions Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex, assumptions that Beauvoir openly admits to have taken from JeanPaul Sartre’s early writings. As one critic observes, ‘The Second Sex suffers from its author’s “rather uncritical . . . embrace [of] Sartre’s brand of Existentialist philosophy” ’.2 To be sure, the gynocentric feminists’ attack on Beauvoir and her followers is ultimately an attack on Sartre’s philosophy, particularly on his theory of embodiment which is predicated on his overall ontology of freedom. They fault Sartre for employing a male-centred model that glorifies male consciousness and activity. According to them, it is an inadequate model, which not only fails to account for women’s unique embodied experience, but devalues it. Contending that traditional feminist writings are infected by the same male bias found in the existentialist phenomenology identified with Sartre, gynocentric feminists set out to reclaim women’s experience by grounding feminist theory in an ontology of female embodiment, one that exalts the difference in women’s reproductive biology. This chapter is an attempt to assess the positions that set apart the two generations of feminists, focusing specifically on the different ontologies that underlie them. Just as any serious treatment of Beauvoir’s work must address its affinity with Sartrean philosophy, my evaluation of the positions inevitably will consist of an evaluation of Sartre’s approach to the problem of embodiment, an approach that is widely shared by twentieth-century phenomenologists, including Gabriel Marcel. Let me begin by tracing the philosophical development of the general view taken by Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, which, in spite of the label ‘radical feminism’, actually represents the more orthodox tradition in feminist scholarship today.3 84

Sartre and Marcel on Embodiment 85

From The Second Sex to the more recent interviews before her death, Beauvoir consistently rejected natural procreation and motherhood.4 Anyone who has read her work is familiar with her depiction of childbearing as a ‘painful ordeal’ that enslaves woman ‘in repetition and immanence’. Indeed, in The Second Sex, she has this to say about woman’s reproductive ‘activity’: From puberty to menopause woman is the theater of a play that unfolds within her and in which she is not personally concerned. . . . In truth the menstrual cycle is a burden, and a useless one from the point of view of the individual. . . . It is during her periods that [the woman] feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing . . . the prey of a stubborn and foreign life. Woman experiences a more profound alienation when fertilization has occurred. . . . Gestation is a fatiguing task of no individual benefit to the woman, but on the contrary demanding heavy sacrifices. . . . All that a healthy and well-nourished woman can hope for is to recoup without too much difficulty after childbirth; but frequently serious accidents or at least dangerous disorders mark the course of pregnancy. . . . Childbirth itself is painful and dangerous.5 Clearly, for Beauvoir, procreation is not authentic human activity but a passive ‘crisis’. What is most alarming about Beauvoir’s view is her claim that there is, apart from and beyond patriarchal arrangements surrounding woman’s fertility, something inherently oppressive about woman’s reproductive biology. Admittedly, patriarchal control over women’s fertility throughout history has placed many undue burdens and hardships on woman’s reproductive life. But in Beauvoir’s view, the primary agent of enslavement remains woman’s own biology, which subjects her to a life of risk and suffering, giving men every opportunity to exert physical force over her. This position is readily endorsed by Firestone. In The Dialectic of Sex, a work dedicated to Beauvoir, Firestone considers woman’s reproductive role a ‘natural inequality’. ‘Reproduction of the species,’ she says, ‘costs women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly . . . physical terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant “female trouble”, early aging, and death’.6 Thus, following in the tradition established by Beauvoir, Firestone also gives woman’s reproductive biology a negative evaluation. It signifies a woman’s existence as both repetitive and immanent. To appreciate the philosophical weight of this position, however, we must keep in mind that, for a theorist such as Beauvoir whose work is so deeply rooted in existential philosophy, woman exists as immanence, both ontically and ontologically. Admittedly, it could be argued that a woman’s prescribed ontic or social existence in patriarchy as the docile housewife renders

86

Constance Mui

her immanent because such a role stifles individual creativity. But apart from patriarchy, Beauvoir understands immanence primarily on the ontological level as constituting the very structure of woman’s embodied existence from puberty onwards. The concept of immanence is built into Beauvoir’s own ontology of female embodiment, which is essentially an extension of the existentialist model of the lived body as a primordial form of transcendence. In order to understand how and why Beauvoir renders woman immanent ontologically, and, more important, why the concept itself is particularly problematic and negative for Beauvoir in the first place, an explication of the existentialists’ treatment of human embodiment is necessary. This will enable us to grasp the notions of transcendence and immanence in the proper existential context that Beauvoir intended so as to dissociate them from their more familiar theological connotations. On the issue of embodiment, Beauvoir is perhaps as much indebted to Marcel as she is to Sartre, even though The Second Sex contains no direct reference to Marcel. One of the most original and poignant accounts of the body as an existential structure is found in Marcel, whose theory, as this essay suggests, is ultimately given its fullest and most salient expression in Sartrean ontology. The theory of embodiment is not only central to Marcelian thought, but it also marks one of Marcel’s more important contributions to the history of philosophy. Philosophers since Descartes have struggled with little success to overcome the problem of mind–body dualism, prompting a disenchanted Sartre to conclude that dualism is something of an ‘embarrassment’ to philosophy. In a decisive attempt to rescue philosophy from Descartes, Marcel developed an original phenomenology of embodiment, one that would later anticipate a similar approach in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. For Marcel, Cartesian dualism is problematic on two counts: it destroys the unity of self and body, as well as the unity of self and world. Having broken up the self, the body and the world into three distinct regions, Descartes faces the impossible task of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. To be sure, Marcel is well aware that Descartes is only a conceptual dualist when it comes to the person, for whom the mind is distinct from the body only in the sense that we could form, in Descartes’ own words, ‘a clear and distinct concept of mind alone as a complete thing’.7 Time and again, Descartes has emphasized that, even though he can conceive of himself as disembodied thought, the mind is nevertheless ‘substantially united with the body’. But what troubles Marcel is precisely this Cartesian notion that the mind or self can be conceived of at all without the body. To him, to conceive of a disembodied self, even if that were possible, is to leave out the very thing that makes the self a self. As far as Marcel is concerned, to say ‘I think’ is to declare myself a bodily being participating in a bodily world. It is this fundamental objection to Descartes that forms the cornerstone of Marcel’s theory of embodiment. Taking a different course, Marcel begins not with doubt but with the indubitable proclamation, ‘I exist!’ It is to proclaim, with exuberance and


bewilderment, that ‘I stand out toward’, that I am extended into, the world. In this way, to say that I exist is to refer immediately to a primordial unity of self, body and world, one that constitutes for Marcel the lived immediacy of participation that cannot be analysed in terms of the traditional split between I and not-I, within and without. Furthermore, it is a unity that manifests itself as a ‘mystery’, a term Marcel uses to capture the sense of wonder and bewilderment that accompany the proclamation of my existence. Whereas a problem relies on primary reflection to analyse my body as a detached object or instrument, a mystery makes use of secondary or existential reflection to preserve the unity lost in primary reflection, enabling me to take my body as mine. Observing the pre-analytic status of a mystery, Marcel aptly characterizes any attempt to grasp the unity in question a ‘meta-problem’. But in what sense is my body to be taken as mine? To be sure, it is mine insofar as I do not reify it into the body-object that it is for others. Not being an object for me, Marcel insists that I do not ‘have’ a body as a possession, but I am my body. According to him, ‘to say that I am my body is to negate, to deny, to erase that gap which, on the other hand, I would be postulating as soon as I asserted that my body was merely my instrument’.8 In other words, there is no gap or distance between me and my body qua mine, the kind that is established in any subject-to-object relationship. This lack of distance sets the condition of my embodiment: my body, as mine, is never thrown over to the side of objects in the field of my direct consciousness; I am thoroughly and fundamentally connected with my body as subject. Marcel further illustrates this connection by introducing the concept of sentir. He points out that my body, in so far as it is properly mine, presents itself to me in the first instance as something felt: I am my body only in so far as I am a being that has feelings. From this point of view . . . my body is endowed with an absolute priority in relation to everything that I can feel that is other than my body itself.9 As ‘absolute priority’, my body is that by means of which I can feel other objects. It is not itself an instrument or a possession, but is what makes possible the instrumentality or possession of anything else whatsoever. The feeling of my body as intimately mine is a primordial feeling, what Marcel calls an ‘urgefuhl’, which is radically distinct from all other feelings and sensations I have with objects. In his Metaphysical Journal, Marcel describes this unmediated, original feeling as a kind of ‘coenesthesia’ between me and my body, which means, quite literally, a shared internal perception. As internal perception, this coenesthetic feeling hovers over any activity I engage in without being the direct focus of my awareness. For example, I feel myself as tired as I move wearily toward the last stretch of a marathon, my attention focused directly on keeping up my pace and finishing the race.

88

Constance Mui

Moments later, I feel myself as suddenly energized as soon as I see the finish line that I am about to cross, all the while thinking to myself that the race will finally be over soon. This coenesthetic feeling between me and my body is one in which neither my self nor my body can be objectified or separated from the other. It instantiates my whole being as an embodied subject organizing my bodily activities in the world. Marcel describes this unobjectifiable experience of my embodiment as ‘submerged’ as opposed to ‘emergent’ participation. Submerged participation, he says, is ‘feeling below the level of thought’.10 That is to say, it is feeling that is not directly reflected on and has therefore not yet emerged as the object of my consciousness. As Marcel puts it, it is a pre-reflective feeling ‘whose very duty is to ignore itself’.11 As the original feeling that lies at the root of all other feelings, it is precisely that which is ignored so that I may engage in a continuous process of (emergent) participation in the world, of opening myself to the world. Marcel’s idea of my body qua mine as unobjectifiable mystery, his insistence on the lack of distance or gap between self and body, his depiction of embodied experience as submerged participation, as feeling below the level of thought, and as feeling that is ignored – in short, his entire position on embodiment is, in a sense, brought to its logical conclusion in Sartre’s ontology of the body. Indeed, why Sartre should choose to remain silent on his debt to Marcel is a mystery of a different sort. It certainly appears that he has taken Marcel’s idea of body-as-subject and made a definitive case for it. Like everything in Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s theory of embodiment is an integral part of his elaborate system and cannot be understood apart from it. His main objective is to develop an ontology of human existence as freedom, arguing that freedom constitutes the very fundamental structure of human existence. According to this, consciousness is freedom in the mode of being rather than that of having. A conscious being is said to exist by moving beyond the past toward some future possibility, and through this dynamic activity engages in the ongoing process of self-definition. Unlike the rock that simply is what it is, this fluid existence of moving-beyond-toward (viz. ‘transcendence’) entails that a conscious being can have no fixed identity, since it is always a step ahead of what we could make of it. Conscious being is therefore free in the ontological sense of existing by wrenching away from the principle of identity. All told, to be conscious is to exist as freedom, and to exist as freedom is to be a non-thing – a ‘nothingness’, as it were – since all things have certain congealed identity. Sartre further strengthens this ontology by demonstrating the complete translucency of consciousness, such that it cannot in any way be contaminated by any opaqueness, any thing-like quality that would compromise its status as nothingness. Thus, Sartre makes an exhaustive case for the traditional theory of intentionality, insisting that consciousness is wholly ‘of’ an object; it is nothing other than the pure intending of its object.12 He cautions that if anything should inhabit consciousness, it would cloud its


lucidity and prevent it from revealing the object precisely as it is. And so, for Sartre, consciousness is empty qua itself and demands as its support some object that would ‘fill’ it and give it some content. Uninfected by opaqueness of any sort, consciousness as ‘nothingness’ is not unlike a clear bubble that would envelop its object and give it the most honest disclosure. This is the ontological structure behind Sartre’s description of consciousness as pure transcendence into the world. And yet consciousness is always and necessarily embodied consciousness insofar as concrete human beings are the only conscious beings that exist in Sartre’s godless world. But given that the body, as flesh, is obviously a substantial and opaque thing, how could consciousness be embodied and still remain translucent? Sartre addresses this problem by demonstrating, as Marcel did earlier, that, in its most fundamental dimension, the body is not merely a thing among things; there is not first a disembodied consciousness that would subsequently be conjoined to a corporeal body. Rather, on the most basic level, I do not experience any separation, any psychic distance or gap, between my body and myself: I am my body. I do not ‘have’ a body but I ‘exist’ (live) my body as the centre of reference through which the world and its things are univocally displayed and revealed to me.13 Just as I cannot take up a point of view on that which is my point of view on the world, I do not apprehend my body in a subject-to-object relation as I do with all things. Paraphrasing the Marcelian description of body-feeling as ‘submerged’ and ‘ignored’ experience, Sartre says that my body-for-me, as the most authentic dimension of my body, is always ‘the neglected’ and ‘the passed by in silence’ while I engage in the pursuit of my projects.14 In Sartre’s words, it is ‘that which is surpassed by the nihilating For-itself’.15 I touch my hand, for instance, in order to put on a glove to do some gardening; it is to surpass it toward some possibility. And while I am gardening it is only by ‘forgetting’ (surpassing) my hands that I carry out my project to plant the rosebushes. I am not in the same subject-to-object relation with my hands as I am with the gardening tool, for I am my hands. Through this account of embodiment, Sartre seeks to preserve the translucency of (embodied) consciousness: I do not apprehend my body as an object, but transcend it toward my project at hand. Here we have Marcel’s and Sartre’s ontology of embodied consciousness, the indispensable basis of Beauvoir’s own ontology of female embodiment, of which Beauvoir herself has reminded us on numerous occasions. For example, she asserts in the introduction to The Second Sex that our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part . . . specifically through . . . projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties . . . Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels

90

Constance Mui

that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.16

Beauvoir promptly extends this to woman, describing her as ‘a being whose nature is transcendent action’. Likewise, the existentialist position on the body-as-subject is captured in the section on biology, where Beauvoir makes it clear that, from the existentialist perspective, ‘the body is not a thing, it is a situation, . . . the instrument of our grasp upon the world’.17 This commitment to the body-as-subject has some serious consequences for Beauvoir’s own ontology of female embodiment, as is evident when she goes on to observe that, for woman, ‘her grasp on the world is . . . more restricted’.18 Beauvoir then takes pains to describe the course of a woman’s complicated reproductive life from puberty to menopause. The female body, with its menstrual cycle and childbearing function, is not something that could be ‘ignored’ or ‘passed over in silence’ so that the conscious female subject could engage single-mindedly in projects of transcendence. Whereas an occasional headache might make it difficult at times for anyone to ‘surpass’ the body,19 I think it is for Beauvoir the repetition of menstrual cycles that drastically alters the primordial relation between a woman and her body. Cycle after cycle, her body makes its presence known by being an object of constant pain and discomfort. Thus Beauvoir observes that woman ‘feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing’.20 If authentic existence involves the kind of body-to-be-ignored experience that Marcel and Sartre describe, then it is no wonder Beauvoir would conclude that ‘woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself’.21 It is this otherness, this alienation from her own body, that compromises a woman’s project toward a life of ‘transcendent action’ and enslaves her ‘in repetition and immanence’. In this way Beauvoir understands immanence as constituting the very ontological structure of female embodiment, something that exists apart from, albeit aggravated by, patriarchal society. But like a good existentialist, Beauvoir also insists that woman, like man, is not determined by biology. Rejecting Aristotelian essentialism, Beauvoir argues that to be conscious is to be a free being whose identity is never fixed, a being who is always in the process of creating itself. If it is a person’s ontological existence as freedom that renders the female body problematical, it is precisely because the person exists as freedom that biology can never define a woman’s destiny. After all, Sartre has observed that ‘what we call freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order’.22 The product of human work, this cultural order has significantly transformed the natural body through technology that aims at alleviating pain and prolonging life. This vote of confidence on human freedom leads Beauvoir to assert that woman is never passive toward her body but has always violently resisted it.23 This can be seen in the long history of women’s


struggles for reproductive freedom, a history of which Beauvoir herself was a part. Beauvoir’s feminism has come under attack in recent feminist scholarship for its male bias resulting from an uncritical acceptance of Sartrean philosophy. I shall address the specific criticisms later. For the moment I want to point out a major problem associated with the existentialist model so as to clear the way for my own evaluation of Beauvoir’s position. It is commonplace for twentieth-century phenomenologists and existentialists to hold up a model that is taken from the male experience. Specifically, they describe the experience of an autonomous body, that of a healthy, privileged, conscious adult male unrestricted by the burdens and demands of maternity. Purporting to be gender-neutral, they sidestep biological differences between the sexes, and hold up the male experience of transcendence as the norm for authentic human activity. Beauvoir, on the other hand, takes into account the biological differences in question, but uses male embodied experience as the norm against which to identify differences in female embodied experience as immanent and therefore problematic. Indeed, her negative view of the female body might have been tainted by Sartre’s description of the body as ‘an obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world’ and as the ‘necessary obstacle of my being’.24 If even the unrestricted male body is portrayed as an obstacle, it is not surprising that Beauvoir would consider the female body a ‘crisis’. Having noted the inadequacy of the existentialist model, I want to assess Beauvoir’s position more closely by turning to two related issues: (1) Is female embodied experience really incompatible with the existentialist view of embodiment? (2) Is it essentially inferior to male experience as Beauvoir suggests? My response to the first question is that not all authentic activities require consciousness to transcend the body completely toward its projects. In fact, many of our projects demand precisely that we pay close attention to our body. For example, it has been said that good posture makes a successful golfer. When Nancy Lopez is putting, she is not merely conscious of the ball or the hole, but perhaps more importantly her straight back and elbows. Likewise, the movers who are carrying a piano down a flight of stairs are not simply aware of the piano or the stairs, but the precarious and precise movements of their own bodies lest they should throw their backs out. These examples show that the body need not be ignored or surpassed completely in order for me to experience it as uniquely mine. The body as subject requires only that consciousness assumes an intentional structure whereby the body is never taken wholly as an object. Admittedly, golfers and movers cannot see the ‘seeing’ of their own bodies; some aspect of their body (for example, the eyes) is always and necessarily transcended. Even the pregnant woman whose bulging belly has become a constant object might not at the same time be directly aware of her own hand that is caressing it. And so, while our body cannot be taken wholly as an object, it does not follow

92

Constance Mui

that the body must be wholly transcended in order for consciousness to project single-mindedly toward meaningful and authentic activities. Taking on some aspect of one’s own body as the direct object of consciousness does not compromise the lucidity of consciousness, nor does it render its activity less authentic or free. Beauvoir has taken the existentialists’ position too narrowly when she assumes that, since woman’s body is, ontologically speaking, more ‘immanent’ in the stimulative sense of being more difficult to surpass completely, female embodied experience therefore leaves something to be desired. Indeed, the inability to forget or transcend one’s own body entirely might not be so negative an experience if we think of Ernest Becker’s assessment of midlife crises in The Denial of Death.25 He argues that many people fall into a crisis in midlife because they have led too symbolic an existence and have not managed to fine-tune between the symbolic and the organic aspects of their lives. If a healthy existence requires that we keep a balance between the infinite and the finite, then we must re-evaluate the role of transcendence in any ontology of the body. It could be argued that, precisely due to the repetition of menstrual cycles beginning at puberty, a woman is more in touch with her body and is more able to plant her feet more firmly in the often terrifying reality of finitude. All told, it is not clear that the kind of transcendence Beauvoir identifies in the ideal model of male embodiment is ultimately representative of a balanced, resourceful existence. The difference found in female embodiment might not be as negative as Beauvoir would have it. Recent feminists have sought to reject such negative evaluation of the female body and to restore value to natural procreation and motherhood as the goal of feminism. This line of thinking, which has flourished in the last decade or so, and is reflected diversely in the writings of Mary O’Brien, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Hartsock and others, is known as gynocentrism. Gynocentric feminists begin with the premise that women’s reproductive biology has a positive value that has been denied and suppressed in patriarchy. They support a feminist philosophy in which woman’s body receives not simply a positive but a higher evaluation than man’s. I have chosen to concentrate on Mary O’Brien’s work because it is the most theoretically grounded. Behind her argument lies a provocative ontology concerning the essential nature of woman, embodiment and consciousness. In The Politics of Reproduction, O’Brien points to the absence of a philosophy of birth as evidence of the dominance of ‘male-stream thought’ and hence the need for ‘feminist metatheories’.26 She contends that philosophers have not theorized about human reproduction because men are biologically excluded from having any meaningful reproductive consciousness. Insisting that our philosophical tradition is an impoverished tradition based on man’s impoverished experience in procreation, O’Brien declares that ‘feminist theory will be a philosophy of birth and regeneration’.27 Whereas


traditional feminists such as Beauvoir have supported a male-centred ontology for all human beings, O’Brien endorses two separate ontologies of consciousness stemming from the fundamental distinction between female and male embodied experience. In her model, it is male consciousness that gets a secondary evaluation. O’Brien begins with a staunch rejection of Beauvoir’s portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth as passive and alienating. She observes that even on the biological level, reproductive labour is a synthesizing and mediating act. It confirms women’s unity with nature experientially. . . . Labour is inseparable from reproductive process in its biological involuntariness, but it is also integrative. It is a mediation between mother and nature and mother and child; but it is also a temporal mediation between the cyclical time of nature and unilinear genetic time. Woman’s reproductive consciousness is . . . a consciousness that she herself is born of a woman’s labour, that labour confirms . . . species continuity. . . . [It] is continuous and integrative, for it is mediated within reproductive process. The fact that this integration has been labelled as ‘passivity’ by male-stream thought is part of the ideology of male supremacy.28 With this obvious attack on Beauvoir’s depiction of human reproduction, O’Brien is quick to point out that ‘all women carry the consciousness of this unity’ and that it is transmitted through culture.29 By contrast, male reproductive consciousness is discontinuous because men do not, and indeed cannot, experience the same mediation of the time gap that women experience in reproductive labor. O’Brien argues that alienation of the male seed at the very start of the reproductive process produces a splintered, alienated male consciousness. And so, man’s relationship to history, to continuity over time, is fundamentally problematic. At the primordial level of genetic continuity . . . men are separated from natural continuity. . . . Men must therefore make, and have made, artificial modes of continuity. . . . [But in essence they] are separated from nature, from the race and from the continuity of the race over time.’30 O’Brien cites paternity, which amounts to the male appropriation of children, as an example of men’s artificial mode of continuity. But men can never experience a genuine unity with nature and species because, given O’Brien’s argument, the mediation required for such unity is linked directly to the very act of reproductive labor, or the potential of experiencing such labor. Furthermore, men’s experience of separation from nature and species

94

Constance Mui

is rooted in the very structure of male embodiment, just as the opposite experience of continuity is rooted in female embodiment. The different ways in which they exist in their bodies mean that women and men develop different relationships, and consciousnesses based on those relationships, with the natural world. In this way O’Brien’s ontology rejects the traditional model that analyzes consciousness in terms of transcendence and immanence, and employs instead a gynocentric model of continuity and separation. In this ontology, authenticity has less to do with the connection between the intentional structure of consciousness and concrete freedom, but more with the integration of oneself with nature, temporality and species in a harmonious unity. O’Brien argues that Beauvoir has started off on the wrong foot by failing to question the value arbitrarily placed on male freedom over female reproduction. As a result she equates human reproduction with animal procreation, thus depriving women’s reproductive experience of any significance. O’Brien concludes that Beauvoir’s uncritical acceptance of Sartre’s male-centred ontology is itself a gesture of bad faith. She promptly extends this criticism to Firestone, who argues that women’s liberation rests on the ultimate transcendence of female biology. O’Brien points out that this amounts to wanting women to become men. What is most troubling to her is that ectogenesis should be seen as an instrument of women’s liberation. In her view, replacing women’s reproductive function with technology would destroy the very thing that makes women’s experience authentic. What we need is a woman-centred theory of reproductive consciousness that celebrates the difference in female biology, not alters it. The strength of O’Brien’s theory lies in her effort to identify the crucial connection between consciousness and its embodiment. This point is well taken regardless of whether one agrees with the conclusion she draws from it. Such factors as the condition of one’s embodiment, the relationship one has to one’s own body and one’s sexual orientation could all shape one’s consciousness. But O’Brien takes us well beyond this insight when she submits that it is reproductive biology that solely and uniformly determines for each sex the conditions of its embodiment, conditions that in turn give rise to two gender-specific consciousnesses. Although provocative, it is a theory fraught with serious difficulties. Perhaps the most obvious difficulty in O’Brien’s formulation of female reproductive consciousness is its failure to explain why such consciousness should be shared by all women, as she believes, and why women exclusively. In saying that this consciousness is transmitted to all women through culture, O’Brien is allowing that reproductive consciousness is not a strictly biological phenomenon but also a cultural one that would operate on women’s collective identity as women. Presumably, women who do not bear children would nevertheless attain it through identification with their own sex. But this is impossible to substantiate, since not all women ascribe


to their gender identity. O’Brien’s assumption is further challenged by the fact that there are men who identify closely with female experiences, as in documented cases of expecting fathers who are so emotionally connected with the birth process that they actually experience labour pains during the birth of their children. It is plainly incongruous that, given the logic of O’Brien’s argument, these men should be precluded biologically from attaining the reproductive consciousness of continuity, while such consciousness should be transmitted through culture to all women, including even those who do not identify with their sex and want to have nothing to do with childbearing. This also calls into question O’Brien’s portrayal of male reproductive consciousness as discontinuous and alienated. She bases this on the act of ejaculation – ‘the physical separation of man from his own seed’ – which symbolizes discontinuity and alienation from species as well as nature. Again, this is hardly reliable evidence for such a bold claim. Moreover, if actually or potentially experiencing an act of physical separation is deemed a sufficient condition for men’s alienated reproductive consciousness, why would women’s consciousness not be similarly affected by their own experiences of physical separation during childbirth? More important than rendering O’Brien’s position arbitrary, these observations bring out the complexity and diversity in human reproductive experiences, which may consist of moments of continuity and discontinuity for both sexes. I think a more plausible account of reproductive consciousness is to understand it in part as the product of how we have chosen to relate to this diverse range of experiences. And any gender differences found therein would likely be a function of cultural conditioning rather than biology, as O’Brien believes. Equally problematic is O’Brien’s assumption that women’s reproductive consciousness is not merely different from men’s but ‘better’, a value judgement reflected in her assertion that ‘nature is unjust to men’.31 O’Brien does not explain why the experience of continuity should be assigned more value than discontinuity. To be sure, qualities associated with continuity are not always superior or desirable; sometimes progress is made precisely when women break continuity with the past. Likewise, qualities associated with discontinuity are not necessarily negative either. Quite the contrary, the encounter with discontinuity could itself compel us to find innovative and creative ways to build bridges, to take risks, to reconstruct or synthesize pieces of a disjointed reality. Hence, one could argue that the consciousness of discontinuity, if it existed, could be seen as a positive potential, motivating us to excel in qualities that make us uniquely human. Finally, whereas O’Brien has criticized Beauvoir for assuming Sartre’s ontology of transcendence modelled after the experience of a healthy, privileged male, her own model is no less a biased one representing a healthy, privileged female. Her description of a synthesizing, mediating and unifying reproductive process is founded on the unmistakably positive experience

96

Constance Mui

of a woman having a child under the most favourable physical, psychological and economic circumstances. However, if any connection is to be drawn between consciousness and embodiment, then we must be consistent and allow that issues of how one is embodied and how one relates to one’s own embodiment would play a significant role in shaping one’s consciousness. We must allow that, in some cases, women’s reproductive consciousness is a product of their negative rather than positive experiences of embodiment. This poses many difficult questions for O’Brien. For example, would a woman whose own mother had died from childbirth and is now threatened by the same fate have a reproductive consciousness of continuity? Would a diabetic woman who risks losing her eyesight during pregnancy have the same reproductive consciousness of integration? And what about the woman who has an acute fear of pain? Arguably, these women could have a reproductive consciousness of dread rather than synthesis and integration. Likewise, the fear of unwanted pregnancy could bring about a reproductive consciousness of disruption rather than of continuity. By replacing the traditional model of the healthy, privileged male with that of a healthy, privileged female, gynocentric feminists are subject to similar criticisms that they themselves have levelled against the tradition. Still more troubling in O’Brien’s gynocentrism is that it has given way to an ethic that purports to make women authentic by re-establishing their essential unity with nature. If we accept O’Brien’s definition of women’s authenticity in terms of a continuous and integrative consciousness rooted in their reproductive biology, we must also be prepared to accept that women who wilfully reject motherhood are denying their own authenticity and are therefore in bad faith. Indeed, this is the danger of locating authenticity in women’s wombs. In this essay I have explicated and critiqued the opposing views that have shaped the debate between traditional and gynocentric feminist philosophers. In closing I wish to address briefly two reasons why I believe gynocentric feminists ought to rethink their strategy to develop a separate ontology for women. First, by accentuating the difference between women and men, their approach takes our focus away from the many qualities that women and men in fact have in common. These qualities, including men’s equal ability to nurture others, give women and men the commonality of experience that forms the basis of authentic being-with-others-in-the-world. In the struggle for gender quality, men and women could certainly accomplish a lot more if they did not lose sight of the common threads that bind them together. Rather than constructing a separate ontology based on gender difference, gynocentric feminists should work toward rebuilding the existing ontology in order to encompass a much wider range of shared human experiences. This brings us to the second point. In evaluating traditional ontology it is important for gynocentric feminists to appreciate it in its proper historical


context. As discussed earlier, Marcel and Sartre developed their theory of embodiment as a way to recover the unity of the person that was hopelessly lost in Cartesian dualism. Above all, their concern was to rescue philosophy from Descartes by working out an ontology that would do justice to the intimate relationship of the person as embodied being in a bodily world. It is an ontology that describes the most fundamental structure of consciousness in terms of the pre-reflective, pre-analytic unity of self, body and world. To be sure, when O’Brien speaks of authentic consciousness as integrative and continuous with nature and species, she owes much to the success of such an ontology in overcoming the notion of a disembodied self that would be detached altogether from other selves and from the world. O’Brien acted prematurely when she issued a blanket dismissal of traditional ontology as male-centred and therefore unworthy of feminist considerations. Quite the contrary, it could be argued that, perhaps unmatched by any other philosophical tradition, the works of many existentialists and phenomenologists provide a potentially rich framework and point of reference for feminist discourse. Specifically, I have in mind, for example, Marcel’s idea of participation, communion and presence, Buber’s understanding of authenticity in terms of dialogue and the I–Thou relation, Heidegger’s portrayal of the ‘mitsein as a basic existential, and Sartre’s attempt to ground a moral imperative against oppression on ontological freedom, just to name a few. These themes constitute an overall ontology of human existence that in essence could validate women’s unique experiences as nurturers, as companions, as relational beings, as resilient fighters for equality and self-determination. These experiences, although largely ignored by the existentialists themselves, could in turn lend support to presuppositions that they have made about the human condition. Observing this affinity between traditional ontology and feminism, it is time for both sides to come together to rebuild a truly genderinclusive ontology of human existence based not on the male or female model, but on a human one.

Notes 1. Iris Marion Young (1990) introduced the concept. 2. O’Brien 1981: 66–7. This concern is shared by other feminists as well, including Andrea Nye, who devoted an entire chapter in her book (1988: 73–114) to this problem. See also Michele Le Doeuff (1979). 3. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the Marcel Society of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December 1996. I am indebted to Patrick Bourgeois, Julie Connelly Pedersen and Julien Murphy for their helpful comments. 4. To get an impression of Beauvoir’s later view, see her interview with Alice Schwarzer, in Schwarzer 1982. 5. Beauvoir 1975: 27–30. 6. Firestone 1970: 232.

98

Constance Mui

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Descartes 1934: ‘Reply to Objections 4’, 102. Marcel 1951: 100. Marcel 1951: 101. Marcel 1951: 140. Marcel 1952: 173. Sartre 1958: 40. Specifically, Sartre states that ‘All is . . . clear and lucid in consciousness: the object with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness is purely and simply consciousness of being consciousness of that object. This is the law of its existence.’ BN 323. BN 330. BN 309. Beauvoir 1975: xxviii–xxix. Beauvoir 1975: 34. Beauvoir 1975: 34. See also Sartre’s discussion on pain in his analysis of the body. He argues that, in the first instance, pain is not part of our reflective consciousness. ‘It is the-eyesas-pain or vision-as-pain . . . it is not named in consciousness, for it is not known.’ Apparently, for Sartre, even in pain, we do not experience our own body as an object (BN 332–3). BN 29. BN 29. Sartre 1963: 152. Beauvoir 1975: 32. BN 326, 328. Becker 1973. O’Brien 1981: 20. O’Brien 1981: 200. O’Brien 1981: 59. O’Brien 1981: 50. O’Brien 1981: 53. O’Brien 1981: 60.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

References Beauvoir, S. de (1975). The Second Sex. Tr. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf. Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press. Descartes, R. (1934). The Philosophical Work of Descartes, vol. 2. Tr. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firestone, S. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks. Le Doeuff, M. (1979). ‘Operative philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir and existentialism’. Ideology and Consciousness, 6: 47–58. Marcel, G. (1951). The Mystery of Being, vol. 1. Tr. G. S. Fraser. London: Harvill Press. Marcel, G. (1952). Metaphysical Journal. Tr. B. Wall. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Nye, A. (1988). Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man. New York: Croom Helm. O’Brien, M. (1981). The Politics of Reproduction. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sartre, J-P. (1958). The Transcendence of the Ego. Tr. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sartre, J-P. (1963). Search for a Method. Tr. H. E. Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.

Sartre and Marcel on Embodiment 99 Schwarzer, A. (1982). After The Second Sex: Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Pantheon Books. Young, I. M. (1990). ‘Humanism, gynocentrism, and feminist politics’. In Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, eds. E. Y. al-Hibri and M. Simons. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 231–48.


Part II Critical Engagement


5 Representing Bodies Quassim Cassam

I In his Essay, John Locke proposes that what makes something a ‘body’ is its possession of primary qualities. What Locke describes in this context as a ‘body’ we might prefer to describe as a ‘material object’. In Locke’s sense of ‘body’, mountains and suitcases are bodies; sounds, holograms and shadows are not. The qualities which Locke identifies as primary are solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Of these, solidity is said to be the most important or fundamental primary quality, the one that is ‘most intimately connected with and essential to Body’ (1975: 123). Given that what makes an object a material object is its possession of primary qualities, it is plausible that in order to think of an object as a material object one must think of it as something with primary qualities. Since one cannot think of something as a possessor or bearer of primary qualities unless one has concepts of primary qualities, it would be worth giving some thought to the conditions under which it is possible for one to acquire and grasp such concepts. I want to examine the thesis that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition and possession of concepts of primary qualities. I will call this thesis the bodily awareness thesis, or BAT for short. If, as I believe, BAT is on the right lines, then we should conclude that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for thinking of objects as material. To think of an object as a material object is not just to think of it as a bearer of primary qualities. It is also to think of it as one among many such things. The question which this raises is whether one can think of one’s own body as an object in this sense. At one point, Merleau-Ponty characterizes one’s own body as a ‘sensible sentient’ (PP 137), as something which sees and touches, as well as something which can be seen and touched. A familiar claim is that that which sees and touches cannot properly be thought of as a ‘thing among other things’ (BN 304). If this claim is correct, there would be an important sense in which one cannot think of one’s own body as an object 103

104 Quassim Cassam

and therefore as a material object. I will be arguing that this conclusion is mistaken. The most that can be concluded from the fact that one’s own body is a sensible sentient is that one cannot think of it as what might be called a ‘mere’ body. My claim will be that thinking of one’s own body as a material object among material objects need not be a matter of thinking of it as a ‘mere’ body.

II Before going any further, more needs to be said about Locke’s account of primary qualities. The plausible thought which underpins this account is that our most basic notion of a material object is that of a bounded, threedimensional space-filler. To fill a region of space is to exclude other bodies from that region of space. For Locke, solidity is the most fundamental of the primary qualities because it is in virtue of their solidity that material objects fill space. In the words of the Essay, the solidity of a body consists in an ‘utter Exclusion of other Bodies out of the space it possesses’ (1975: 125). Figure and extension can be seen as primary qualities of bodies that are consequential upon their solidity. Is Locke right to regard solidity as the primary quality which is most intimately connected with and essential to the body? In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Kant argues that ‘matter fills a space only by moving force’, that is, ‘by such a force as resists the penetration, i.e. the approach, of another matter’ (1985: 499). To suppose that the property of matter by which it fills a space is solidity is to suppose that matter fills its space ‘by its mere existence’ (1985: 497). In contrast, Kant’s proposal is that ‘only when I attribute to that which occupies a space a force to repel every external movable thing that approaches it, do I understand how a contradiction is involved when the space which a thing occupies is penetrated by another thing of the same kind’ (1985: 498).1 Thus, the moving force by which matter fills a space is repulsive force. Impenetrability is ‘given immediately with the concept of matter’ (1985: 509) and the impenetrability of matter is a consequence of its repulsive force. Since material objects are composed of matter, and repulsive force belongs to ‘the essence of matter’ (1985: 511), an important part of what it is to be a material object is to be something which exerts repulsive force. Is this a claim which Locke would dispute? Although force is not one of Locke’s primary qualities, it is worth remembering that Locke connects solidity with impenetrability and that he represents the impenetrability of bodies as consisting in their possession of what Kant would call repulsive force. On the other hand, Locke’s considered view is that the impenetrability of bodies is a consequence of their solidity.2 To be more precise, Locke’s idea is that impenetrability is a power and that solidity is the categorical ground of this power. This is what Kant rejects. He regards repulsive force as a fundamental

Representing Bodies 105

force which cannot be further explicated. In particular, it cannot be explicated by reference to what Locke calls solidity. For Kant, Lockean solidity is an occult quality which cannot intelligibly be regarded as the categorical ground of impenetrability.3 In the present context, it is not important to decide whether Kant is right to be so dismissive of the proposal that solidity is the ground of impenetrability. What is important is the idea that part of what it is to be a material object is to exert some degree of force. Repulsive force is, however, not the only force which material objects exert. It is also plausible that for something to be a material object is for ‘changes in its states of motion to be explicable by the mechanical forces acting upon it, and for changes in its motion to exert such forces’ (Peacocke 1993: 170). On this mechanistic conception of force, bodies have force insofar as they are in motion. In contrast, Kant thinks of repulsion as a ‘dynamical’ rather than as a mechanical force. In the words of one recent commentator, dynamical forces such as repulsion and attraction are ones which bodies have ‘independent of their states of motion or rest’ (Warren 2001: 111). The fact remains, however, that if primary qualities are the intrinsic or fundamental properties of material objects as such, then force, whether mechanical or dynamical, is a primary quality. By the same token, to think of an object as a material object is to think of it as something which exerts, and is subject to, the appropriate forces.4 This is the basic insight which I wish to extract from my discussion of Locke and Kant. What is the bearing of this insight on BAT? If force is a primary quality, then one cannot think of an object as material unless one has the concept of force. How, then, is the concept of force acquired? It is in connection with this question that an argument for BAT begins to emerge. The first thing to notice is that there is, as Peacocke remarks, ‘such a thing as the sensation of force. It is experienced when, for instance, a heavy book is resting on your lap and pressing downwards’ (1993: 172). In addition to the bodily sensation of force or pressure, there is also ‘the state of consciously exerting a greater or lesser force with one of your own limbs’ (ibid.). Thus, to quote Peacocke once again, ‘it seems that either sensation or action may each in principle provide routes to the acquisition of a conception of force (if it is acquired)’ (ibid.). Suppose, next, that it can be shown that sensation and action are not just possible routes to the acquisition of the concept of force but that they are the only possible routes to the acquisition of this concept. We can then point out that only an embodied being could have bodily sensations of force or pressure, or be conscious of exerting greater or lesser force with one of its own limbs. It is not just that one must be embodied in order to acquire the concept of force, but also that one must be aware of oneself as embodied in order to acquire this concept. In being conscious of exerting some force with one’s body or of the forces acting on one’s body, one cannot fail to be aware of one’s own body. One cannot fail to be aware of oneself as a bodily being. So if bodily sensation and action are the only possible routes to the

106 Quassim Cassam

acquisition of the concept of force, then awareness of one’s own body is, as BAT implies, a necessary condition for the acquisition of this concept. I will call this the acquisition argument for BAT.5 Just as awareness of one’s own body might be said to be a necessary condition for the acquisition of the concept of force, so it might be held that such awareness is also a necessary condition for the acquisition of other primary quality concepts. For example, Kant suggests in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science that ‘by means of the sense of feeling’, matter’s property of filling space ‘provides us with the size and shape of an extended thing, and hence with the concept of a determinate object in space’ (1985: 510). To feel an object is to be in contact with it, and the contact which is at issue here can only be bodily contact. A closely related point emerges from Kant’s Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View. In that work, Kant suggests that nature has given man the sense of touch so that ‘by feeling all the sides of a body he could form a concept of its shape’ (1974: 34). In the absence of this sense, ‘we should be unable to form any concept at all of the shape of a body’ (ibid.). Since tactile awareness of another body requires awareness of one’s own body, this implies that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition of the concept of shape. So here we have another application of the acquisition argument for BAT. How good is the acquisition argument? As far as the concept of force is concerned, one question which this argument raises is whether bodily sensation and action are possible routes to the acquisition of the concept of force. Another question is whether bodily sensation and action are the only possible routes to the acquisition of the concept of force. On the first of these questions, one difficulty is that primary qualities are supposed to be mindindependent properties of bodies. One sense in which primary qualities are mind-independent is that they are properties which exist independently of being perceived. As Locke describes them, ‘they are in the things themselves, whether they are perceived or no’ (1975: 141). Another sense in which primary qualities are mind-independent is that the things which possess them need not be, or have, minds. This is another way of saying that among the things which we usually think of as possessing primary qualities whether we perceive them or not are inanimate objects. So if force is a primary quality, then to have the concept of force is to have the idea of a property which is mind-independent in both of these senses. This means that the bodily sensation of pressure or consciousness of exerting force with one of one’s own limbs can be the source of our concept of force only if it is possible to derive the idea of a mind-independent property of bodies from these sources. The most serious objection to the acquisition argument is that it fails to explain how this is possible. It fails to explain how the bodily sensation of pressure can provide one with the idea of unsensed or unperceived forces. Equally, it fails to explain how consciousness of exerting force with one of one’s own limbs can give one the idea of forces which are capable of being exerted


by inanimate objects. The problem, it seems, is that we cannot conceive of forces which no one senses or is conscious of exerting on the model of forces which we do sense or which we are conscious of exerting.6 Similar considerations apply to what the acquisition argument says about our acquisition of the concept of shape, for it is difficult to see how feeling all the sides of a body can give one the idea that shapes can exist unfelt. In effect, this is Berkeley’s objection to Locke’s account of the source of our ideas of primary qualities. Locke thinks that sensation is the source of such ideas but Berkeley’s point is that sensation cannot give us the idea of a property of objects which can exist unsensed. Berkeley’s conclusion was that the very idea of a primary quality in Locke’s sense is unintelligible from an empiricist perspective. The acquisition argument for BAT simply asserts that sensation is a route to the acquisition of concepts of primary qualities but it does not address Berkeley’s objection to this proposal. It neither responds to this objection nor attempts to defuse it. One way of attempting to defuse Berkeley’s objection would be to argue that it relies on an unacceptable picture of the nature of experience or sensation. For a better account, it might seem that we need to introduce the idea of an intuitive mechanics.7 For in order to grasp a primary quality concept, such as shape or mechanical force, it is plausible that one must be capable of engaging in various forms of spatial and mechanical reasoning.8 In engaging in these forms of reasoning, one must employ the principles of an intuitive or primitive mechanics. For example, one must grasp principles which connect the force which material objects exert with their weight and motion, as well as principles which connect the behaviour of material objects with their shape. On one view, the principles of an intuitive mechanics will also include the principle that primary properties persist through gaps in observation.9 If this proposal is on the right lines, then one will be able to conceive of primary properties as capable of existing unperceived as long as one’s concepts of such properties are embedded in an intuitive mechanics. Without the appropriate intuitive mechanics, one would not be in a position to make sense of the notion of existence unperceived. How does any of this help to defuse Berkeley’s objection to the view that concepts of primary qualities can be extracted from sensation? One suggestion is that this objection is only compelling if it is read as making the point that concepts of mind-independent properties cannot be extracted from what Peacocke calls ‘uninterpreted sensations’ (1993: 173). For present purposes, uninterpreted sensations are ones which one could have without already having an intuitive mechanics. In contrast, interpreted sensations presuppose one’s possession of an intuitive mechanics. From the fact that concepts of mind-independent properties cannot be extracted from uninterpreted sensations, it should not be concluded that sensation is not a possible route to the acquisition of the concept of force. The correct conclusion is that the sensations from which the concept of force can be extracted

108 Quassim Cassam

must be interpreted sensations. An impoverished conception of the deliverances of sensation is bound to cast doubt on the idea that sensation can be the source of concepts of primary qualities, but the lesson is surely that a viable empiricism must operate with a robust conception of what sensation delivers. The obvious problem with this line of argument is that it fails to explain our acquisition of those principles of spatial and mechanical reasoning which constitutes one’s intuitive mechanics. Since uninterpreted sensations cannot be the source of these principles, it would seem that the only empiricist alternative is to regard interpreted sensations as their source. Yet interpreted sensations are, by definition, such that they presuppose one’s possession of an intuitive mechanics. How, in that case, can sensations of this type be the source of one’s intuitive mechanics? If interpreted sensations presuppose one’s possession of an intuitive mechanics, and one’s intuitive mechanics incorporates the idea that there are certain properties which are capable of being perceived and of existing unperceived, then we are none the wiser as to the source of this idea. Indeed, to the extent that neither interpreted nor uninterpreted sensations can be its source, it would be tempting to conclude that it must be an innate idea, and therefore one which does not have its source in experience or sensation. In fact, this is not quite right. The discussion so far assumes that sensations must either be uninterpreted or internally connected with an intuitive mechanics, but these are not the only possibilities. Another possibility would be to view sensations as intrinsically intentional or representational psychological occurrences which do not presuppose one’s possession of an intuitive mechanics. Understood in this way, sensations represent objects as possessors of mind-independent primary qualities such as force and shape, but it is possible for sensations to have this representational content even if they are not, in Peacocke’s sense, interpreted. If uninterpreted sensations are not intrinsically intentional, then it is no surprise that concepts of mind-independent primary qualities cannot be extracted from them. If, on the other hand, uninterpreted sensations are representations of mindindependent primary qualities and are uninterpreted only in the sense that they are enjoyable without any prior grasp of an intuitive mechanics, then it is no longer a mystery how they can provide a route to the acquisition of concepts of such qualities. On this interpretation, the sense in which many empiricists operate with an unacceptably impoverished conception of what sensation delivers is not that they fail to see that sensations must be interpreted. It is that they fail to see that sensations can be representational without presupposing our possession of the very concepts whose acquisition empiricism is attempting to explain. The question which now arises is whether we really understand how sensations which are ‘enjoyable without possession of an intuitive mechanics’ (Peacocke 1993: 172) can be genuinely representational. Suppose that we


think of interpreted sensations as ones whose representational content is a form of conceptual content.10 In these terms, what I have just been suggesting is that it is sensations whose content is representational without being conceptual which provide a route to the formation of concepts of mind-independent primary qualities. So what is now needed is, among other things, a defence of the view that there can be non-conceptual representational content. Perhaps the most promising defence of this view from an empiricist perspective would be to point out that it is only intelligible that concepts can be derived from experience or sensation if we suppose that not all sensory content is conceptual.11 In particular, unless we are prepared to view concepts of primary qualities as innate, we must concede that there are experiences which do not presuppose them. This is just another way of saying that we must concede that the representational content of experience need not be wholly conceptual. This amounts to a transcendental argument to the effect that the existence of non-conceptual representational content is a necessary condition for concepts, including concepts of primary qualities, to be derivable from experience. One worry about this argument is that it begs an important question by assuming that concepts of primary qualities are derivable from experience. Another is that the transcendental argument does not explain how intrinsically intentional sensations can be non-conceptual. It argues that there must be sensations which are both representational and nonconceptual but it does not say how this is possible. For example, it does not explain how sensations of pressure which are enjoyable without any prior grasp of an intuitive mechanics can represent sensed forces as capable of existing unsensed. To this extent, the transcendental argument for nonconceptual representational content cannot be the end of the story, even if one grants its empiricist presuppositions. Any serious account of the nature and possibility of non-conceptual representational content would need to address questions in the theory of content which go well beyond the scope of the present discussion. As far as this discussion is concerned, the important point to have emerged is that if it makes sense to think of sensations as non-conceptual representations of primary qualities, then Berkeley’s objection to the acquisition argument is inconclusive. In principle, we can still think of concepts of primary qualities as formed from sensations as long as we refrain from thinking of sensations either as non-representational or as presupposing concepts of primary qualities. From an empiricist perspective, what is controversial about the acquisition argument for BAT is not its assumption that the concept of force can be acquired from sensation or action but its assertion that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition of this concept. So the question which now needs to be addressed is whether bodily sensation and action are the only possible routes to the acquisition of the concept of force.

110 Quassim Cassam

Empiricists who are sceptical about BAT might argue that action cannot be a strictly necessary condition for the acquisition of the concept of force since what H. H. Price calls a ‘purely contemplative being’ (1932: 275), one that is incapable of physical action, might still be capable of acquiring this concept. A common reaction to this proposal is to insist that such a being could only acquire the concept of force as long as it can still experience bodily sensations of force or pressure. But now suppose that its nerves are damaged in such a way that it cannot experience bodily sensations of force. If, in the absence of such sensations, a purely contemplative being can still acquire the concept of force, then it is doubtful whether awareness of one’s own body is a strictly necessary condition for the acquisition of this concept. How exactly is a purely contemplative being which lacks sensations of force supposed to have acquired the concept of force? Suppose that we agree with the mechanist that the force of a body in motion is exercised or manifested when it collides with another body, thereby causing a change in the state of motion of that other body. On the assumption that even a purely contemplative being can still see other bodies as colliding and deflecting, a natural suggestion would be that this amounts to a purely visual experience of mechanical force, a type of experience from which the concept of mechanical force can be extracted even by creatures which lack awareness of their own bodies. What we have here, therefore, is an apparent counterexample to the thesis that awareness of one’s own body is essentially involved in all of the different kinds of experience from which the concept of force can be derived. The most that can plausibly be said is that awareness of one’s own body is involved in some of the experiences from which this concept can be derived. A Humean response to this line of argument would be to object that the concept of force is not exemplified in visual experience, but this response does not seem to be correct. We can indeed see objects as exerting and being subject to mechanical forces. To borrow an example of Strawson’s, ‘in a great boulder rolling down the mountainside and flattening the wooden hut in its path we see an exemplary instance of force’ (1992: 118). In the light of this and other such examples, it would not be plausible to insist that the concept of force is not exemplified in visual experience. And if the concept of force is exemplified in visual experience, then there is no reason to deny that the concept of force can be extracted from visual experience. The suggestion that the concept of force can be extracted from visual experience only poses a threat to BAT on the assumption that visual experience does not presuppose awareness of one’s own body. This assumption is, however, open to question since it is arguable that there is no such thing as a visual experience which does not involve some awareness of one’s body. Visual experience involves visual sensations, and visual sensations are, like all sensations, bodily occurrences. More generally, as Ayers remarks, our visual awareness of things in space ‘involves some awareness of the relation


which they bear to the part of us from which we see’, and this awareness is ‘integrated with, indeed involves, our general tactile and proprioceptive awareness of the head and its relation to the rest of the body’ (1991: 187). The fact that the concept of force can be extracted from visual experience therefore poses no immediate threat to BAT. It also needs to be recognized that sight is normally integrated with the other senses and with the capacity for action. This leads to the idea that only a creature with a sense of touch and the ability consciously to exert force with its own body can properly be said to see other bodies as exerting and being subject to mechanical forces. The suggestion here is that if it were not for one’s own bodily engagement with the world, there would be nothing in virtue of which it would be correct to say that force enters into the intentional content of visual experience. The intentional content of visual experience is, to this extent, determined by the complex relations that exist between visual perception and our other perceptual and active capacities. On this account, a being which has no bodily engagement with the world would have no impression of force, not even a purely visual impression. In contrast, we can see objects as exerting and being subject to mechanical forces because mechanical force is not something which we are only aware of visually. According to this line of argument, there is good reason to question the coherence of the hypothesis of a purely contemplative being that has no awareness of its own body but which is still capable of enjoying visual experiences which resemble the visual experiences which we enjoy. Our visual experiences are, in the first instance, experiences with spatial content, and the spatial objects which we are aware of as such are, for the most part, also ones which we can touch. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘visible and tangible belong to the same world’, and ‘every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space’ (PP 134). To imagine a being with no awareness of its own body is to imagine a being with no sense of touch and no capacity for physical action. To imagine a being with no sense of touch and no capacity for physical action is, however, to imagine a being whose visual experiences would be quite unlike ours. Indeed, it is open to question whether such a being could even be said to have visual experiences with determinate spatial content, let alone visual experiences which present themselves as experiences of force. So we should not make the mistake of taking the fact that our visual experiences have a certain intentional content to show that a being with no awareness of its own body could have visual experiences with the same intentional content. In arguing in this way, it should not be forgotten that there are actual human beings who suffer from various forms of what might be called ‘bodyblindness’. There is, for example, the well-documented case of a person who has no touch or proprioception below the neck but who is apparently still capable of seeing the world more or less as the rest of us do.12 Yet this is still

112 Quassim Cassam

not a case of someone with no awareness of his own body seeing the world as we do. The subject in this case is only partially body-blind and can still act in the world. He can lift things and is aware of the effort which he puts into doing so. He has the concept of force, but there is no reason to suppose that his route to this concept did not involve awareness of his own body. So BAT remains intact. The thesis for which I have been arguing is similar to a thesis for which W. Joske argues in his book Material Objects. Joske’s thesis is that ‘our appreciation of the fact that we live in a world in which material things are common is dependent upon awareness of our own body’ (1967: 18). The basis of this thesis is the thought that solidity or impenetrability is the defining property of matter, and that we are aware of solid objects ‘because we can move our limbs and body, and know that such movements are being resisted’ (ibid.). In response to the suggestion that an inactive being with the sense of sight could still be visually aware of impenetrability just as we are, Joske argues that this presupposes that such a being already has the concept of solidity. This concept might be available to an inactive being, but only if it has the capacity to feel sensations of pressure and collision. To this extent, it remains the case, according to Joske, that ‘without an awareness of our own body, at least as the seat of sensations, we would have no proper concept of solidity at all’ (1967: 20), and so would be unable to detect solidity with our eyes. Much of this is highly congenial to what I am arguing here, but there are important differences. One important difference is that the emphasis in Joske’s account of what it is to be a material object is on the notion of solidity rather than that of force. Another difference is that on Joske’s account only someone with the concept of solidity can see things as solid. Since I do not wish to commit myself to the view that intentional content is conceptual, my claim is not that only someone with the concept of force can see things as exerting and being subject to forces. For Joske, seeing objects as material requires awareness of one’s own body because awareness of one’s own body is required to establish the concept of solidity. On my view, seeing objects as material requires awareness of one’s own body because awareness of one’s own body is part and parcel of the other perceptual and active capacities with which the capacity to see objects as material must be integrated. Awareness of one’s own body is required to establish the concept of force, but this is not the basis of my proposal that seeing objects as material requires awareness of one’s body. Before concluding this phase of my discussion, there is one more issue which needs to be addressed. At several points in my exposition of the acquisition argument for BAT, I have referred to the possibility of regarding concepts of primary qualities as innate. A concept is innate just if it is possessed without having been acquired.13 Since innate concepts have not been acquired, they have not been acquired from experience. So even if it is true that bodily awareness is a necessary condition for the acquisition of concepts


of primary qualities from experience, it does not follow from this that bodily awareness is a necessary condition for the possession of such concepts. This does not follow because these concepts might be possessed without having been acquired. And if bodily awareness is not a necessary condition for possession of concepts of primary qualities, then it would seem that awareness of one’s own body is not a necessary condition for thinking of objects as material. One thing that might be said in response to this line of argument is that the best case for regarding a given concept as innate is that we cannot understand how that concept could have been acquired from experience. Hence, as long as the notion of nonconceptual representational content makes it intelligible that concepts of primary qualities can be derived from experience, this counts against the view that these concept are innate. Still, it must be conceded that nothing that I have said shows that it would be strictly incoherent to regard concepts of primary qualities as innate. The lesson is that a convincing argument for BAT cannot content itself with pointing out that awareness of one’s own body is essentially involved in those kinds of experience from which it is possible to acquire the concept of force. The acquisition argument for BAT might convince empiricists who believe that the concept of force must be acquired, but it should not convince nativists who think that this concept is not, or need not be, acquired. It would be helpful to remember at this point that BAT is not just the thesis that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition of concepts of primary qualities. It is also the thesis that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the possession of concepts of primary qualities. If this were not the case, BAT would not licence the conclusion that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for thinking of objects as material. If, on the other hand, awareness of one’s own body turns out to be a necessary condition for the possession of concepts of primary qualities, then even nativists must concede that a thinker with no awareness of her own body would be unable to think of objects as material. In brief, the case for insisting that possession of concepts like force and shape requires awareness of one’s own body is this: like other concepts of primary qualities, these are concepts which someone who has them must be in a position to apply on the basis of experience. This means that a thinker who has shape concepts must be able to perceive the shape of things and apply the appropriate shape concept on the basis of her experiences of shape. Equally, possession of the concept of force is bound up with the capacity to perceive or exert some degree of force. There are, of course, concepts which are not tied to experience in this way, but one’s concepts of primary qualities would lack what Kant calls objective reality if it were not for the fact that instances of them are given as such in experience. This is the point at which awareness of one’s own body comes into the picture. In the acquisition argument for BAT, awareness of one’s own body

114 Quassim Cassam

figures as an essential component of those experiences from which concepts of primary qualities are acquired. The present suggestion is that awareness of one’s own body is an essential component of those experiences of primary qualities which provide one’s concepts of primary qualities with objective reality. A thinker who has never had any experience of shape or force is one who has no proper conception of shape or force. The point is that there are ways of thinking about shape and force which are, as Peacocke remarks, ‘made available by certain kinds of conscious experience’ (1993: 173). Thinkers who lack these kinds of conscious experience cannot think in these ways, and thinkers who cannot think in these ways cannot be credited with concepts of these primary qualities. In deference to Kant, I will call this the objective reality argument for BAT. Among the many questions raised by this argument, one concerns the validity of the objective reality requirement itself. Concepts have objective reality if and only if they have ‘application to objects which can be given to us in intuition’ (B150).14 Kant’s proposal is that concepts which cannot, in this sense, be ‘made sensible’ (A240/B299) are empty or insignificant. Although some concepts which lack objective reality might retain a meaning which is ‘purely logical’ (A147/B186), the meaning of concepts of primary qualities cannot be purely logical.15 In the absence of any relation to experience, they would be ‘without sense’ (A240/B299).16 This is not to deny that a thinker might lose her ability to experience primary qualities while retaining her concepts of such qualities. To this extent, we can allow that a thinker who gets into a state of body-blindness or total sensory deprivation might retain her ability to think of objects as material. But it only makes sense to think of someone retaining an ability if she had it in the first place, and the point of the objective reality requirement is to insist that one cannot grasp concepts of primary qualities without ever having been in a position to experience their instances. The implication of this discussion is that the sense in which awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for thinking of objects as material is not that one must always be aware of one’s own body in order to think of objects as material. The suggestion is rather that in order to think of objects as material, one must sometimes be aware of one’s own body. This is so because one cannot think of objects as material unless one has concepts of primary qualities, one cannot have concepts of primary qualities without any experience of primary qualities, and one cannot experience primary qualities without any awareness of one’s own body. As far as the objective reality argument is concerned, this is the best that can be done for BAT. It is one thing to draw attention to the connections that exist between experience, bodily awareness and concepts of primary qualities, but proponents of BAT must also be careful not to exaggerate the tightness of these connections. To sum up, I have considered two arguments for BAT, the acquisition argument and the objective reality argument. Neither argument is unproblematic


and it has also emerged that BAT is, in some ways, a more modest thesis than it might have appeared at the outset. Nevertheless, the concessions made by the acquisition and objective reality arguments should not be allowed to obscure the central point of this discussion. The central point is that there is a complex story to be told about what is involved in the acquisition and grasp of concepts of primary qualities, and that neither our acquisition nor our grasp of these concepts can be satisfactorily accounted for without reference to our awareness of our own bodies. It is this awareness which, in conjunction with many other cognitive capacities, provides us with a concrete sense of the kind of world which we inhabit.

III The remaining issue is whether we can think of our own bodies as material objects. In so far as awareness of one’s own body is required in order to think of objects as material, it is also required in order to think of one’s own body as material. To think of one’s own body as a material object is to think of it as a bearer of primary qualities and as a thing among other things. The first of these requirements is easily fulfilled. For example, there is little difficulty in thinking of one’s own body as shaped and as exerting and being subject to mechanical forces. There is little difficulty in thinking of one’s body in these terms because the forms of awareness which provide one with concepts of such primary qualities are also forms of awareness which provide one with a sense of one’s body as shaped and as exerting and being subject to mechanical forces. For to be conscious of sensations of force is to be conscious of one’s own body as something which is subject to force. To be conscious of exerting force with one’s limbs is to be conscious of one’s own body as an exerter of mechanical force. In each of these respects, one is conscious of one’s own body as a locus of mechanical force and is thereby in a position to think of it as a material object. A more difficult question is whether one can think of one’s own body as a thing among other things, a material object among material objects. The problem is to reconcile the idea that one’s body is a thing among other things with its role in sensation and perception. Among those who think that these two aspects of one’s own body cannot be reconciled in one’s thought about it is Sartre. He claims that one’s body is either ‘a thing among other things, or it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot be both at the same time’ (BN 304). In other words, in representing one’s own body as a subject of perception and sensation, one deprives oneself of the means to represent it as an object among others in the world. By the same token, one deprives oneself of the means to represent it as a material object. One response to this argument would be to deny that it makes sense to regard one’s own body as a subject of sensation and perception. Sensations, including those of force and pressure, certainly present themselves as having a bodily location, but this is not the same thing as saying that one’s own

116 Quassim Cassam

body is, or presents itself as being, the bearer or subject of such sensations. As for the idea that one’s body is something which sees and touches, as well as something which can be seen and touched, it might be objected that one’s body is not literally the subject of one’s visual and tactile perception. One’s body is only what one uses in order to perceive the surrounding world, but it is not that which perceives the surrounding world. As long as one’s body is thought of as an instrument rather than as a subject of perception, there is no problem reconciling its role in perception with the idea that it is a thing among other things. Someone who argues in this way can agree that there is a sense in which my body is that by which things are revealed to me. The present suggestion is that the sense in which this is so does not make it difficult to think of one’s body as a material object. After all, even a Cartesian can accept that my body is that by which things are revealed to me without accepting that my body is the subject to which the things which I perceive reveal themselves. For Descartes, one’s body is something possessed by the subject of one’s experiences. Unlike the subject itself, it can easily be thought of as a material object, as a thing among other things and as a bearer of primary qualities. It is true that in experiencing sensations of force or in being conscious of exerting force with one’s own limbs one cannot fail to be aware of oneself as embodied, but being aware of oneself as embodied need not be a matter of being aware of one’s thinking, perceiving self as a material object. Although I will not attempt to make the case here, I believe that this line of argument is mistaken and that it is indeed appropriate to think of one’s own body as that which perceives the surrounding world rather than as a mere instrument of perception. What makes it difficult to think of one’s body as that which perceives the surrounding world and as a bearer of sensations is the idea that one’s body is a ‘mere’ body, a piece of inanimate physical matter. On this account, a purely instrumental conception of the role of the body in sensation and perception is hard to avoid. There is, however, an alternative to this way of thinking. The alternative is to insist that that which sees and touches is not a mere body but a living human body.17 It is one’s living body which can coherently be thought of as a constituent of one’s subjectivity, as a point of occupancy for psychological properties. Yet, contrary to what Sartre maintains, the thought that one’s living body belongs to the subjective order and is in this sense that by which things are revealed to me does not preclude the thought that this body is also a thing among other things. It does not preclude the thought that one’s living body is a material object among material objects. The possibility of thinking of one’s living body both as a subject and as a thing among other things is one to which Merleau-Ponty draws attention when he describes our body as ‘a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them’ (PP 137). The suggestion that one’s body has a ‘double belongingness to the order of


the “object” and to the order of the “subject” ’ (ibid.) is Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive gloss on the idea that one’s body is a sensible sentient or what he describes elsewhere as a ‘subject-object’ (PP 95). In so far as one’s sentient body is what sees and touches, its role in perception is not just that of an instrument. In so far as it belongs to the objective order, it is a thing among other things. The mistake is to assume that it cannot be both at the same time. I would not wish to suggest that these brief remarks constitute an adequate defence of the thesis that our bodies belong to the order of the subject and to the order of the object. The suggestion that our bodies, even our living bodies, belong to the order of the subject is one which is likely to meet with especially strong resistance. For present purposes, however, the more important claim is that our bodies belong to the order of the object, and that this is so even if they also belong to the order of the subject. If they do not belong to the order of the subject, then so much the worse for those who maintain that we cannot think of our bodies as objects among others in the world. The position, then, is that whether one conceives of one’s body as something which one uses to perceive the surrounding world or as that which perceives the surrounding world, there is no good reason to suppose that it cannot properly be regarded as a thing among other things. To this extent, there is no good reason to suppose that it cannot properly be regarded as a material object. As I have been emphasizing, the interesting and difficult question is not whether one can conceive of one’s body as a material object but whether the forms of bodily awareness which make this conception available to us are ones which someone who possesses concepts of primary qualities can coherently be supposed to lack. If what I have been arguing is correct, then, with allowances for the possibility of partial or temporary body-blindness, this question should be answered in the negative.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See Warren 2001 for an illuminating discussion of Kant’s proposal. See Locke 1975: 123. For more on this aspect of Kant’s thinking, see Warren 2001: 103–6. For a closely related suggestion, see Peacocke 1993. There is a brief discussion of this argument in Cassam 1997: 81–3. Strictly speaking, the acquisition argument is only an argument for one component of BAT, for the claim that awareness of one’s own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition of the concept of force. 6. As Peacocke puts it, if ‘a sensitivity to sensations were all that is involved in having a conception of force, conceiving of forces no one experiences would be none too easy a thing to do: you would have to conceive of something felt by no one on the basis of sensations you do feel’ (1993: 173). 7. See Peacocke 1993 for more on this idea.

118 Quassim Cassam 8. There is an influential defence of this proposal in Evans 1980. Evans argues that in order to grasp the primary properties of matter one must ‘master a set of interconnected principles which make up an elementary theory – of primitive mechanics – into which these properties fit and which alone gives them sense’ (1980: 95). 9. See Evans 1980: 95. 10. For present purposes, the representational content of an experience or sensation is conceptual if its subject must possess those concepts which are required to specify its content. Its content is non-conceptual if the concepts required to specify its content are ones which are not, or need not be, possessed by its subject. For more on the notion of non-conceptual representational content, see Evans 1982, Bermúdez 1998 and Peacocke 2001. 11. For a closely related line of argument, see Bermúdez 1998: 58–62. 12. The case which I have in mind is the one described in Cole 1991. 13. This characterization of what it would be for a concept to be innate is drawn from Bennett 1966: 98. 14. All references in this form are to Kant 1933. 15. In the Schematism, the concepts which Kant describes as retaining a purely logical meaning ‘even after elimination of every sensible condition’ (A147/B186) are the categories. 16. The concepts which Kant is discussing at this point are those of mathematics. 17. For more on this alternative, see Cassam 1997: 56–61.

References Ayers, M. R. (1991). Locke. Vol. I: Epistemology. London: Routledge. Bennett, J. (1966). Kant’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bermúdez, J. L. (1998). The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cassam, Q. (1997). Self and World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cole, J. (1991). Pride and a Daily Marathon. London: Duckworth. Eilan, N. McCarthy, R. and Brewer, B., eds. (1993) Spatial Representation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Evans, G. (1980). ‘Things without the mind – a commentary upon chapter two of Strawson’s Individuals’. In Van Straaten, ed., 76–116. Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Ed. J. McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joske, W. (1967). Material Objects. London: Macmillan. Kant, I. (1933). Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. (Original German publication: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781.) Kant, I. (1974). Anthropology from A Pragmatic Point of View. Tr. Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original German publication: Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798.) Kant, I. (1985). Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Tr. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Original German publication: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 1786.) Locke, J. (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Original publication 1690.) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Peacocke, C. (1993). ‘Intuitive mechanics, psychological reality, and the idea of a material object’. In Eilan, McCarthy and Brewer, eds., 162–76.

Representing Bodies 119 Peacocke, C. (2001). ‘Does perception have a nonconceptual content?’ Journal of Philosophy, XCVIII: 239–64. Price, H. H. (1932). Perception. London: Methuen. Strawson, P. F. (1992). Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Straaten, Z., ed. (1980). Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Warren, D. (2001). ‘Kant’s dynamics’. In Watkins, ed., 93–116. Watkins, E., ed. (2001). Kant and the Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6 Resisting Sartrean Pain: Henry, Sartre and Biranism Michael Gillan Peckitt

The body is lived and not known. This is explains why the famous ‘sensation of effort’ by which Maine de Biran attempted to reply to Hume’s challenge is a psychological myth. We never have any sensation of our effort, but neither do we have peripheral sensations from muscles, bones, tendons, or skin, which have been suggested to replace the sensation of effort. We perceive the resistance of things. What I perceive when I want to lift this glass to my mouth is not my effort but the heaviness of the glass – that is, its resistance to entering into an instrumental complex which I have made appear in the world. (BN 324) It is with the above quote that Sartre (in Part III, section I of Being and Nothingness) characterizes, albeit briefly, how we as embodied individuals engage with the world, how we sense or experience the world. Sartre, in opposition to Maine de Biran, perhaps the most important Gallic theorist of the body prior to Sartre,1 denies that kinaesthetic sensation plays a role in our experience of our bodies. Rather, we just perceive or experience the ‘resistance of things’, the world appears to us as being ‘difficult to deal with’, but we do not experience the effort involved in our attempts to deal with that world. This denial of the idea that we experience the effort involved in the moving of our bodies has implications for any phenomenology of sensation, but especially for any phenomenology of pain. In this chapter I explore and challenge Sartre’s view of the role of sensation and the body as it pertains to pain. I argue, with the aid of the work of the phenomenologist Michel Henry, that Sartre’s ‘anti-Biranism’ leads to a confused phenomenology of physical pain, and that his story needs to be modified to accommodate certain quasiBiranian notions if it is to produce an accurate phenomenology of pain. In particular, Sartre’s otherwise useful division between ‘lived’ and ‘known’ in application to the body appears to fall apart when dealing with the issue of 120

Resisting Sartrean Pain

121

pain, for in pain the body can be treated as an object, which (according to Sartre’s way of thinking) would imply that our own body can be known even if it is not ordinarily experienced this way. I wish to argue that in pain we do at times experience the sensation of effort – thus Sartre’s claim that ‘We never have any sensation of our effort’ is at best an over-statement; but also contra Sartre that this sensation ushers in the possibility of a third way of experiencing the body, which is between ‘lived’ and ‘known’. Sartre states that ‘The body [for-itself] is lived and not known.’ In Being and Nothingness he is attempting to challenge a longstanding philosophical prejudice that the body is, and is best understood when viewed as, an object of knowledge, that is to say when it is treated as an object that can be analysed ‘objectively’ and ‘dispassionately’. According to the prejudice under attack, human bodies, whether our own or others’, are to be treated as mere things: we should, in short, treat the body as if it were a corpse. This is a conception of the body present in philosophy since Descartes, who, according to Drew Leder, ‘models the living body first and foremost upon the inanimate’ (1998: 118). Sartre is critical of this picture on at least two levels: first, it requires us to put aside the fact that the body – whether our own or another’s – is animate, alive, expressive and affective, that is, capable of being hurt and receptive to pleasure. But secondly, it ignores the fact that one’s own body is lived, not known: we are our bodies and it is because we are embodied that we experience the world. However, our own bodies are not ordinarily experienced as objects of knowledge or things, but, in a far more fundamental sense, we experience them non-positionally: our bodies are normally always in the background without a definite perspective by which we thematize and conceptualize them. Living human bodies in general for Sartre are not normally perceived as mere things or corpses, and this includes the body of the Other: perception of the Other is, in a sense, perception of the Other’s subjectivity. Bodies are not usually objects in this sense; however, the experience of pain seems to challenge this, as I shall now elucidate. This notion of the body as lived and not known is itself challenged by Sartre’s discussion of pain. He argues that pain is neither known nor accessible by the lived body precisely because of the nature of pain. Sartre introduces another way of looking at pain. He takes the example of a person reading a book while his eyes hurt and asks us to imagine that the reader stops focusing on the book and instead focuses on the pain: what he calls ‘apprehending my pain’ (BN 335). When we reflect, we transcend or go beyond such categorizations and experience the pain as a ‘psychic object’ (BN 335). It is constantly available to consciousness although distinct from it. As such, we experience pain as having a ‘life of its own’, separate from consciousness, possessing its own characteristics, its own time, its own reality; we relate to it as a kind of object, just as we would when we relate to a book or a computer. This is why, when talking about experiences in this way, Sartre

122 Michael Gillan Peckitt

employs the term ‘psychic object’, by which he means to indicate a way of understanding a phenomenon. As a ‘psychic object’ pain – the experience expressible as ‘ouch’ – is understood as illness. As illness, pain is distinct from consciousness, but is available to it. Thus we can say that ‘the illness is draining’. Yet illness understood as a ‘psychic object’ is not a mere object, it is not something ‘out there’ to be grasped, because it remains permanently available to consciousness, unless, of course, the illness has passed, in which case the psychic object will no longer be available since the pain has ‘gone’. After this description it might be tempting to treat the pain qua illness simply as an object. Certainly, whereas prior to reflection, the pain was, in a sense, the body, ‘for the reflective consciousness the illness is distinct from the body’ (BN 337); yet the ‘illness is mine’ (BN 337), it is experienced as mine precisely because I am passive with respect to it, because my relation to it is affective. Thus illness is experienced as: an object but as an affective object. One directs oneself first towards one’s pain so as to hate it, to endure it with patience, to apprehend as unbearable, sometimes to love it, to rejoice in it (if it if foretells a release, a cure), to evaluate it in some way. Naturally it is the illness which is evaluated or rather rises up as a necessary correlate of the evaluation. The illness is not known; it is suffered, and similarly the body is revealed by the illness and likewise suffered by consciousness. (BN 337) At the beginning of this discussion we examined Sartre’s statement that ‘the body is lived and not known’, paying special attention to the problems that pain might bring to this idea. Whilst one may grant that we do not normally know our body, rather we live it, pain would appear to cause problems for this idea as pain is, in a sense, the very impossibility of living. However, Sartre has shown that this is only true if we regard pain purely as an object available to consciousness, rather than an experience to be endured. It is in connection with his phenomenology of pain that I wish to interrogate the idea that ‘We perceive the resistance of things. What I perceive when I want to lift this glass to my mouth is not my effort but the heaviness of the glass.’

Between resistance and effort: an autobiographical experience I have cerebral palsy, yet I am lucky enough to be able to walk with a cane for the time being. However, because of my walking I have bad posture leading to chronic back pain. A Socratic definition of ‘cerebral palsy’ might not include ‘bad posture leading to chronic back pain’, but it is commonly experienced by those with certain types of cerebral palsy. Against this brief medical history imagine the following autobiographical scenario:


123

I am sitting on my sofa, listening to Tom Waits’ Closing Time and drinking a glass of Syrah. After some time, I get up and refill my glass and take my seat again. I pick up the glass, but as I raise it to my mouth, I feel shooting pains go through my body, centring on the lower part of my back. I freeze, the glass remains near my lips and yet I am unable to complete my task. For a moment it is almost as if I am paralysed, I know how to drink wine, I know how to move my hands, but I am simply unable to move them, and the wine glass now feels as heavy as a brick. I put the wine back on the coaster, shaking from the weight that the glass has now assumed whilst I am in my painful state. I try to again to pick up on the glass but now it is if there is wall between me and the glass. In this description there are two aspects that one finds in Sartre’s account. First is the resistance of the wine glass. My experience of resistance comes only after the pain has ‘set in’ and when further attempts are made to pick up the glass, whilst I, the subject, am experiencing what Young (1998) called ‘inhibited intentionality’, the withholding of the bodily intentional arc, which at its most severe can literally ‘reverse’ the Husserlian or Merleau-Pontyan cogito, turning the ‘I can’ into an ‘I cannot’. Of course, I cannot say whether my experiences are shared by others. However, I do believe I can use my experiences of pain to challenge Sartre’s claim that all we feel is the ‘resistance of things’.

Why does Sartre need resistance? Why does Sartre need to insist that ‘We perceive the resistance of things’ rather than the sensation of effort? It is hardly adequate simply to view him as engaging in a Freudian-style patricide on his predecessor Maine de Biran. He must have reasons for dispensing with the idea of the sensation of effort; and after all one might be able to feel both the resistance and the effort. Let us remind ourselves of what he said: The body is lived and not known. This is explains why the famous ‘sensation of effort’ by which Maine de Biran attempted to reply to Hume’s challenge is a psychological myth. We never have any sensation of our effort . . . . We perceive the resistance of things. What I perceive when I want to lift this glass to my mouth is not my effort but the heaviness of the glass – that is, its resistance to entering into an instrumental complex which I have made appear in the world. (BN 324; bold emphasis added) If Sartre’s sole reason for dispensing with the sensation of effort is that ‘the body is lived and not known’, Sartre has, I claim, made two interesting assumptions. First, that lived and known are distinct, and secondly, that


things that are known are just that: things or objects of knowledge. This, indeed, is the basis of the distinction between the lived body and the known body: something that is ‘lived’ is experienced, not treated as an object of knowledge. Sartre does go on to give an impressive theory as to how lived is different from known, yet it is difficult to see how this distinction can work with the sensation of pain, which, ironically enough, was just the kind of experience for which Sartre intended this distinction to account. If, as stated above, it is possible to experience both the resistance and the sensation of effort, then the possibility of Biran’s sensation of effort is put back in play. To explore this I turn to the work of Michel Henry (1922–2002).

Henry’s phenomenology of life Henry’s main project is an attempt to counter the idea that that which is experienced must be separate from the self that experiences it. Why is such a division necessary for a satisfactory concept of the self? In Dan Zahavi’s terms: Obviously, self-manifestation or self-awareness has been analyzed in the course of time, and particularly within phenomenology one can find detailed analyses of a pre-reflective, non-objectifying self-awareness. But according to Henry, all of the previous analyses have failed to conceive of self-manifestation in a sufficiently radical manner. If one approaches Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida one will repeatedly encounter the claim that division, separation and opposition are structural elements in all kinds of manifestation, including self-manifestation, and that even self-manifestation therefore implies a form of ekstasis, a form of internal splitting, self-alienation or self-transcendence, or as it also sometimes put: Self-manifestation presupposes a confrontation with radical otherness . . . (Zahavi 2007: 134) It not merely that Henry cannot see why such a ‘self-division’ is necessary; he also thinks it limits the scope of phenomenology, since, as long as the self is divided, separated, split or in some form of ekstasis, the phenomenon of phenomenology will always be ‘external’, ‘out there’ and ‘worldly’. For Henry, this is mistaken because it makes an assumption about the nature of the phenomenon he calls ontological monism: ‘the assumption that there is only one kind of manifestation, only one kind of phenomenality. It has thus been taken for granted that to be given is always to be given as an object’ (Zahavi 1999: 51). Even after Sartre’s critique emphasizing the lived nature of the bodily self, the bodily self we encounter pre-reflectively is still a kind of object for Henry,


125

for it is external to the self. The idea of a phenomenon that is interior has been lost. Sartre in particular is offering the kind of account of the self that Henry rejects. Sartre is of course totally opposed to the idea that the self can ‘coincide’ with itself, the idea of pure presence. Rather, Sartre defends the view that ‘self-awareness and self-transcendence are interdependent. In his view, subjectivity is characterized by a pre-reflective self-awareness of not being the object of that which it at the same time is intentionally conscious’ (Zahavi 2007: 134). In Being and Nothingness Sartre begins by arguing that the very notion of presence involves some kind of division, and this is no less true of selfpresence, where there is a division within the subject itself: Concretely, each for-itself is a lack of a certain coincidence with itself. This means that it is haunted by the presence of that with which it should coincide in order to be itself. But as the coincidence in Self is always coincidence with Self the being which the For-itself lacks, the being which would make the For-itself a Self by assimilation with it – this being is still the For-itself . . . What must be noted here is that the For-itself is separated from the Presence-to-itself which it lacks and which is its own possibility, in one sense separated by Nothing and in another sense by the totality of the existent in the world, inasmuch as the For-itself, lacking or possible, is For-itself as a presence to a certain state of the world. (BN 100, 102) Thus, according to Sartre, human subjectivity is never a whole present to itself, and can never be so. For Sartre, our notion of human subjectivity is constituted by a division between what we are – our facticity on the one hand, and, on the other, our transcendence, our possibilities. As (living) human subjects we will always lack the latter since there will always be more possibilities, hence, for Sartre the human subject can never achieve self-presence. This separation within this duality between facticity and transcendence is pernicious. For Sartre, because of its facticity, the human subject is self-aware, but this self-awareness cannot be viewed in terms of self-identity, because to attempt self-awareness is to attempt transcendence through intentionality. Hence there is always a division between self-awareness and self-identity, a ‘fissure’ within consciousness.

Henry, pure immanence and ipseity The account given by Sartre would be abhorrent to Henry. Henry accepts no fissure, fracture, separation, division or self-alienation within the subject. Nothing but absolute subjectivity where the self completely coincides


with itself will do. The motivation behind Henry’s radical conception of the subject is, as we have seen, to combat ontological monism, the idea that in order to show itself, the ‘phenomenon’ of phenomenology must be an object, exterior, or ‘ec-static’ – in effect, worldly. This insistence on the ontological priority of the world leaves us with a concept of ‘phenomenon’ that is severely limited, doomed always to be worldly. One way of understanding Henry’s critique is through Husserl. Husserl, in his famous ‘principle of principles’, states ‘that whatever presents itself in “intuition” in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself ’ (Husserl 1982 § 24: 92). Henry has no problem with the idea that phenomena are given to the subject and that the good phenomenologist should bracket the question of the ‘world’: questions as to where the phenomena may have come from. The only real problem with Husserl is that he does not go far enough in keeping transcendence, and thus some notion of the world, in play. Henry would prefer to bracket the world entirely, but this is not to deny that phenomena are not given to the subject, and in this Henry remains faithful to the principle of principles, merely that the phenomena that are given need not be worldly, but rather interior, immanent to the subject, where there is no notion of the world. As John Mullarkey states, for Henry: Husserl plays with different and incompatible forms of immanence and transcendence in order to stabilise phenomenalisation into an object and a subject, thus missing its radicalism. The transcendence suspended by the epoché is only of one, special variety, namely the ‘empirical world’, with the ‘psychical ego [moi] inscribed within it’. An outside, albeit empty, world as such remains – one that Henry emphasises as a specular, as a ‘view’. The idea of immanence concomitant to this empty but still present outsideness becomes that which is not the empirical world but which aims at it emptily. This is a mitigated, half-immanence, not immanent enough. (Mullarkey 2006: 51) Absolute subjectivity is immanent to itself, and the essence of its ipseity, Henry insists, is affectivity, which Henry begins to describe in The Essence of Manifestation: Affectivity reveals the absolute in its totality because it is nothing other than its perfect adherence to the self, nothing other than its coincidence with self, because it is the auto-affection of Being in the absolute unity of its radical immanence. In absolute unity of its radical immanence, Being affects itself and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it which


127

does not affect it and which is no experienced by it, no content transcendent to the interior experience of self which constitutes this content. (Henry 1973: 682) For Henry, the absolute subject which appears through self-affection is not worldly, it is immanent to itself, affects itself, experiences itself as itself without interference from ‘outside’. It is therefore not experiencing sensations or affections, in the sense of feeling ‘the smoothness of paper’, for that would be to bring in the world and commit the sin of ontological monism. It experiences itself as itself, and this experience is entirely interior. Henry has more to say about this absolute subject, despite its ‘unworldliness’: its ipseity, he claims, is to be understood as suffering. Suffering, for Henry, is passively experienced by the self and as such admits of no Other, no divide. When one suffers, whilst there may be an external cause or reason for the suffering, one’s experience is had by one’s self alone, it is experienced by ‘me’ and no other. Nor is it initially subject to reflection: one does not have the opportunity to contemplate suffering, one merely receives it. Hence affectivity understood as suffering is called by Henry ‘original ontological passivity’: [T]his is what the passivity of suffering means, this is what happens in it; the effectiveness of Being given. In it, in its original passivity with regard to the self, feeling takes possession of its content, experiences it, experiences itself, enjoys the self and in this enjoyment of the self as pure enjoyment, as constitutive as such of its Being, arrives at this Being and places itself in it in effectiveness. In the helplessness of suffering the power of feeling is born. (Henry 1973: 475) The experience of suffering giving rise to the ‘power of feeling’ for Henry does not give the subject access to the world, but rather to the essence of subjectivity as affectivity: ‘The subjectivity constitutive of Being and identical to it is the Being-with-self, the arrival in the self of Being such as it occurs in the original passivity of suffering. The essence of subjectivity is affectivity’ (Henry 1973: 476). The understanding of ipseity as affectivity qua suffering in turn leads him to the conclusion that: ‘Every life is essentially affective, affectivity is the essence of life’ (Henry 1973: 477). Thus the phenomenology of life is born (or rather self-affected). Henry has a very specific notion of life. First, life is absolute and transcendental, that is to say it is not empirical. When he speaks of life, he does not mean to refer to individual persons or empirical egos, and so he parts company with Heidegger and with some of Husserl. Life also has nothing to do with Being, life is ‘not’, it is not anything to do with, ‘the world’ or ‘Being’; it has the characteristic of ‘Nothingness’, or ‘Not-Being’.


Pain and life: living and knowing the body with Henry Some might take the fact that Henry’s account is an account of the self prior to its being-in-the-world as a negative aspect. I would admit that Henry gives the reader very little idea of what it would be like to experience such subjectivity, although it should be made clear that he never denies the existence of the world or Others; in fact, in Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body Henry states: ‘Certainly, subjectivity is always a life in the presence of a transcendent being’ (1975: 187). Henry acknowledges that there is the Other, the non-ego, whether it be the world or, in a very Fichtean sense, the not-I, that even his work leaves something unanalysed, untouched; but this may just be a methodological move in order to talk about the self with philosophical rigour. In his later work Henry goes on to theorize how the self relates to the world. Perhaps he does not do this in his earlier work because he felt the need to make sure the ground was firm before moving on to the world, rather as Descartes does not talk about the existence of the world or others until he has reached his cogito. Henry offers an account of subjectivity where the self has no separation or duality, where there is nothing akin to Sartre’s idea of facticity and transcendence; the self coincides with itself in that it is completely immanent to itself. Indeed, the absolute self lives and knows itself. This is not, of course, the living or knowing that Sartre has in mind, but – and this is the crucial point for our argument – it does allow the possibility that there is a sensation of effort in play. Henry’s self, after all, being immanent to itself would experience its own feeling. Whilst to talk of sensations would be to admit the ‘outside’, as outlined above, Henry does talk about pain and suffering as that which reveals affectivity as the essence of ipseity to the Self. Thus, Henry’s account of absolute subjectivity could be helpful in understanding experiences such as pain. In pain we are not experiencing an outside force or another person, but our own self; pain, in other words, is self-experience. Whilst in pain we are experiencing the pain and ourselves through the pain, and in that sense we experience the effort of pain – although admittedly not as a sensation, for that would be too ‘worldly’ for Henry; rather, it is that we experience pain as existential process, a process given to the subject whereby we come to understand ourselves and our essence, a process which we ourselves experience. It is here that a certain kind of Biranism about pain is located. It is through the experience of pain that we have complete knowledge of what we experience or live, as it is an experience of self where the self is completely unified. It is this process which cannot be captured by Sartre’s ‘lived’/’known’ distinction when discussing pain; there is a sense in which pain is both lived and known, although the two terms do not do it justice. It is experienced, felt, and it is in the ‘feeling’ that the sensation of effort


129

appears; thus Sartre cannot say that we never experience the sensation of effort and must allow Biran back into the debate.

Note 1. The phenomenologist Gabriel Marcel discusses a similar issue in works such as The Mystery of Being (2001); see Mui 1999 (reprinted in this volume) for a discussion. Biran remains largely neglected, despite preceding Marcel by more than a century.

References Gron, A., Damagaard, I. and Overgaard, S., eds. (2007). Subjectivity and Transcendence. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Henry, M. (1973). The Essence of Manifestation. Tr. G. Etzkorn. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Henry, M. (1975). Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. Tr. G. Etzkorn. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Tr. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original German publication: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, 1913.) Leder, D. (1998). ‘A tale of two bodies: the Cartesian corpse and the lived body’. In Welton, ed., 117–30. Mullarkey, J. (2006). Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London: Continuum. Welton, D., ed. (1998). Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, I. M. (1998) ‘Throwing like a girl’. In Welton, ed., 259–73. (First published Human Studies, 3 (1980): 137–56. Reprinted in I. M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indianapolis and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.) Zahavi, D. (1997). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, D. (2007). ‘Subjectivity and immanence in Michel Henry’. In Gron et al., eds.

7 Sartre and Death: Forgetting the Mortal Body in Being and Nothingness Christina Howells

This chapter focuses solely on the treatment of death in Being and Nothingness.1 Sartre certainly does not ‘forget’ the bodily aspect of death in literary works such as Le Mur (1939), Morts sans sepulture (1946) or Les Chemins de la liberté (1945–9), where it is indisputably prominent; nor in later texts such as L’Idiot de la famille (1971–2), where his early account of facticity is deepened and transformed. But in Being and Nothingness we would also arguably expect to see a discussion of the complexity and ambiguity of bodily facticity in relation to mortality. Death would seem to lie at the heart of any discussion of subjectivity, of the mind–body question, or of the relationship between en soi and pour soi, all of which are analysed at length in Being and Nothingness: Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness; it cannot be united with a body. Similarly being-for-others is wholly body; there are no ‘psychic phenomena’ there to be united with the body. There is nothing behind the body. But the body is wholly ‘psychic’. (BN 305) The body forms part of the ‘facticity of the for-itself’ (BN 308), it is ‘nothing other than the for-itself’ (BN 309), ‘as such, the body is not distinct from the situation of the for-itself’ (BN 309): In one sense . . . the body is a necessary characteristic of the for-itself . . . the very nature of the for-itself demands that it be body. . . . Yet in another sense the body manifests my contingency . . . And Plato was not wrong either in taking the body as that which individualizes the soul. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that the soul can detach itself from this individualization by separating itself from the body at death or by pure thought, for the soul is the body inasmuch as the for-itself is its own individuation. (BN 309–10) 130

Sartre and Death

131

It is then impossible for the for-itself to escape its individuation by the body, and impossible for the soul to separate itself from the body, even in death. But ‘the body is perpetually the surpassed’, it is ‘a point of view and a point of departure’. This means that ‘I am my body to the extent that I am; I am not my body to the extent that I am not what I am’ (BN 326). In so far as it is the facticity of the for-itself, the body is not ‘a contingent addition to my soul; on the contrary it is a permanent structure of my being’ (BN 328). Sartre reminds us of the major characteristics of the facticity of the for-itself: my birth, race, class, nationality, physiological structure, character, past. ‘All this . . . is my body . . . the body is the contingent form which is taken up by the necessity of my contingency’ (BN 328). And although Sartre does not refer to death at this point, he does refer to illness and disability: Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass it toward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being, and I cannot be crippled without choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way in which I constitute my disability (as ‘unbearable’, ‘humiliating’, ‘to be hidden’, ‘to be revealed to all’, ‘an object of pride’, ‘the justification for my failures’ etc.). (BN 328)2 Like illness, pain is also something to surpass, but in his analysis of ‘mal aux yeux’ (pain in the eyes), for example, Sartre appears to accept that it may entail not merely a choice of attitude towards the pain itself but also fundamental changes in my relation to the world; in reading, for example: It is with more difficulty that the words are detached from the undifferentiated ground which they constitute; they may tremble, quiver; their meaning may be derived only with effort, the sentences which I have read twice, three times may be given as ‘not understood’, as ‘to be re-read’. (BN 332) Our awareness of pain may be unreflective – in this case the pain is identified with the body, it is my eyes (BN 332) and it is my reading (BN 335); or it may be reflective, in which case I may posit it as something distinct (BN 335). Sartre’s analyses conclude with an identification of the body and the ‘psychic object’: ‘not that the psyche is united to a body but that . . . the body is its substance and its perpetual condition of possibility’ (BN 338); and he argues, though without taking time to explain his position fully, that it is the body which ‘motivates and to some degree justifies psychological theories like that of the unconscious, problems like that of the preservation of memories’ (BN 338). One of the other major forces that transforms the body besides illness is, of course, sexual desire. Here Sartre’s primary preoccupation is with the

132 Christina Howells

analysis of consciousness according to the categories of pour soi and pour autrui (for-itself and for-others), but he also considers the transformation of consciousness itself by desire. Where love is concerned, his main interest is in the struggle between consciousnesses, for ‘unity with the Other is . . . unrealizable’ (BN 365) because of my projects which put me in direct connection – and direct conflict – with the liberty of the Other. I do not propose to spend time now on these well-known passages where Sartre speaks of a circle of fascination and seduction which fits so well, as he recognizes, with ‘Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation’ (BN 370). But I would like to pause for a moment to consider desire, itself a failure in Sartre’s scheme just as much as love, but where the body seems to play a much more important role, and where we may perhaps get an inkling of the kind of more complex, embodied analyses Sartre might have produced on the subject of death, although Being and Nothingness is not the place to find them. Heidegger, Sartre maintains, never considers sexuality in his existential analytic, ‘with the result that his “Dasein” appears to us as asexual’ (BN 383). For Sartre, man is not a sexual being because he possesses sexual organs, it is rather the opposite: ‘man possesses a sex only because he is originally and fundamentally a sexual being’ (BN 383). And it is in desire that the profound unity of the pour soi is manifest, for there is no division possible between body and consciousness in a desiring pour soi: ‘we do not desire the body as a purely material object. . . . Consciousness remains always at the horizon of the desired body’ (BN 386). Similarly, when we desire, our consciousness as well as our body is transformed, desire is ‘trouble’, ‘troubled’ and troubling, in the sense that water may be troubled, that is to say, moved and disturbed; desire troubles both our body and our consciousness, it makes them opaque and confused. In contrast to pain or hunger, which consciousness may choose to flee or surpass (we will return to this later), ‘desire compromises me’: Consciousness is clogged, so to speak, by sexual desire; it seems that one is invaded by facticity, that one ceases to flee it and that one slides towards a passive consent to the desire . . . even the feeblest desire is already overwhelming. . . . The heavy, fainting consciousness slides towards a languor comparable to sleep. . . . The man who desires becomes a heavy tranquillity which is frightening; his eyes are fixed and appear half-closed, his movements are stamped with a heavy and sticky sweetness . . . In this sense desire is not only the revelation of the Other’s body but the revelation of my own body. . . . The For-itself experiences the vertigo of its own body. . . . Thus the final state of sexual desire can be swooning as the final stage of consent to the body. . . . The being which desires is consciousness making itself body. (BN 388–9)

Sartre and Death

133

In desire, the Other is made incarnate through the caress, through contact with my body: ‘the revelation of the Other’s flesh is made through my own flesh . . . so possession truly appears as a double reciprocal incarnation. Thus in desire there is an attempt at the incarnation of consciousness’ (BN 391). Sartre is keen to insist on the specificity of desire and its difference from other bodily needs, and claims that ‘everyone is aware that there is a great abyss between sexual desire and other appetites’ (BN 387). He also recognizes briefly the relationship between desire and death: From this point of view desire is not only the clogging of a consciousness by its facticity; it is correlatively the ensnarement of a body by the world . . . that is why sensual pleasure is so often linked with death. . . . There is, for example, the theme of ‘pseudo-death’ so abundantly treated in all literatures. (BN 392) But Sartre does not pursue the link between desire and death, neither of which is a ‘physiological accident’ (BN 393), but rather an integral part of the facticity and embodiment of the for-itself. It is quite clear from his evocative descriptions of desire that Sartre is somewhat of a specialist and knows exactly what he is talking about! But where his account of death is concerned, Sartre’s approach is so external and neutral that we may well ask ourselves if he has ever had much contact with a dying person or even with someone seriously ill. His exegesis of death seems remarkably untouched by the experience of dying, even as an onlooker. He makes no attempt to understand death as any kind of human experience, but merely approaches it as the end of life. Before moving on to an analysis of this apparent ignoring of the phenomenology of dying, it is worth pointing out that the same question arises concerning hunger: if Sartre had experienced severe hunger or malnutrition, would he still claim with such confidence that, unlike desire, it does not compromise the for-itself? Hunger, like sexual desire, supposes a certain state of the body defined here as the impoverishment of the blood, abundant salivary secretion, contractions of the tunica, etc. . . . but this facticity does not compromise the nature of the For-itself, for the For-itself immediately flees it toward its possibles, that is toward a certain state of satisfied-hunger. . . . Thus hunger is a pure surpassing of corporal facticity. (BN 387) Let us turn now to death and, more specifically, to dying, which is arguably what is missing in Sartre’s analysis. We have noted the first list of aspects of facticity described by Sartre in the chapter on the body, ‘Being for Others’,


in Part III of Being and Nothingness: my birth, class, nationality, physiological structure, character, past – the ‘necessary condition’ of my existence and of my freedom (BN 328). But when Sartre comes to analyse facticity again in the first chapter of Part IV, in the section entitled ‘Freedom and Facticity: The Situation’, the ingredients have changed somewhat: announced initially as ‘my place, my body, my past, my position . . . my fundamental relation to the Other’ (BN 489), when the five elements come to be analysed they constitute yet a third selection, that is to say, my place (six pages), my past (nine pages), my environment (six pages), my fellow man (22 pages) and my death (22 pages). But if death figures on the list for the first time, some passing remarks in earlier sections have prepared us for what to expect: ‘Death reduces the for-itself-for-others to the state of simple for-others’ (BN 112); ‘At my limit, at the infinitesimal instant of my death, I shall be no more than my past. . . . Death reunites us with ourselves. Eternity has changed us into ourselves. At the moment of death we are’ (BN 115). But these notions, which are ontological rather than phenomenological, are all to be found in Part II, which describes Being-for-itself, and where, logically, we would not expect to find an account of the dimension of embodiment, which appears only in Part III where our Being-for-Others reveals our bodily nature and our flesh to us. In Part IV, Sartre analyses the relations between facticity, situation and liberty, and attempts to explain how our freedom can be total without being capricious, incomprehensible or gratuitous. This is where we find the famous and beautiful passages on radical conversion which we sense represents for Sartre the best image of human freedom, even if he calls it ‘one among others of its many manifestations’: These extraordinary and marvellous instants when the prior project collapses into the past in the light of a new project which rises on its ruins and which as yet exists only in outline, in which humiliation, anguish, joy, hope are delicately blended, in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let go . . . (BN 478) We see here how Sartre’s philosophical writing is quite capable of moving us and making us understand the experience of freedom, rather than merely giving a dry and technical account of it, even if he does draw his examples from literature rather than from everyday life (André Gide’s Philoctete and Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Raskolnikoff). In his analyses of facticity, Sartre insists that ‘there are as many ways of existing one’s body as there are For-itselfs’ although ‘certain original structures are invariable and in each For-itself constitute human reality’ (BN 456). One of these invariable structures is certainly mortality. And it is in Part IV that Sartre starts to consider death in more depth. He rejects, as we would

Sartre and Death

135

expect, most philosophical and religious attempts to understand death: death is neither ‘l’inhumain absolu’ (EN 615, ‘the non-human’, BN 532) as it is in what Sartre calls the ‘realist’ view, nor yet merely ‘an event of human life’ as in the idealist, humanist conception. Sartre can well understand, he insists, the desire to recuperate death that is to be found in poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, novelists such as André Malraux and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, but he refuses all such attempts at recuperation. The Heideggerian conception of ‘Sein zum Tode’ (being-toward-death) in which death becomes ‘mine’ is attractive, he argues, precisely because it allows us to internalize death and relate it to human freedom. Indeed, it even contains an incontestable element of truth, but ultimately it involves a ‘sleight of hand’ (BN 533) in so far as it entails a vicious circle which individualizes death in terms of Dasein, just as it individualizes Dasein in terms of death (BN 534). This is certainly not the place to enter into the details of this debate or to try to assess whether Sartre has or has not understood Heidegger’s argument correctly; my concern is simply to remind readers of the major lines of his ontological analysis before moving on to a discussion of what it lacks: that is to say, a phenomenological dimension. Death, as Sartre describes it (against Heidegger), ‘is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities’ (BN 537).3 Life, Sartre acknowledges, is ‘a long waiting’, and this is not a contingent defect in our human nature, a kind of nervousness that we could learn to overcome; it arises rather from ‘the very nature of the for-itself . . . the very structure of selfness: to be oneself is to come to oneself’ (BN 538). None the less, Sartre refuses to allow death to form an integral part of human waiting. Moreover, we can, of course, agree with him that death does not give meaning to our life, but without accepting what he sees as the corollary of this, that death ‘can only remove all meaning from life’ (BN 539). For Sartre, death represents the triumph of the point of view of the Other over my life: ‘The unique characteristic of a dead life is that it is a life of which the Other makes himself the guardian’ (BN 541). He does not seem able to imagine our own relationship to our future death; he passes immediately from his refutation of Heidegger to an analysis of the Being-for-Others of death. It is as if his rejection of Heidegger risked being undermined if he took into account the point of view of the for-itself. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim: ‘there is no place for death in the being which is for-itself’ (BN 540). But this sits so ill with our experience and intuitions that Sartre finds himself obliged to remain in an abstract domain where he uses quasi-inhuman expressions such as ‘when the for-itself “ceases to live”’ (BN 540), which seems to me to conflate two levels of analysis, and indeed where Sartre’s scare quotes arguably indicate his own unease. It is true that there are moments when Sartre seems about to change direction and to give us a phenomenological description of our


relationship to death. He accepts, for example, the huge difference there is between a death that is unexpected and death in old age: There is a considerable difference in quality between death at the limit of old age and sudden death which annihilates us at the prime of life or in youth. To wait for the former is to accept the fact that life is a limited enterprise; it is one way among others of choosing finitude and electing our ends on the foundation of finitude. To wait for the second would be to expect my life to be a failed enterprise.4 (BN 536) But immediately after this acknowledgement, he seems to correct himself and hastens to explain that since ‘we have . . . every chance of dying before we have accomplished our task, or, on the other hand, of outliving it’ it follows that ‘one can wait for a death from old age only blindly or in bad faith’ (BN 536). This insistence that it is inauthentic to expect or indeed wait for death, even in its most familiar forms, might well appear to represent a retreat from mortality, or a refusal to face it. But I do not propose to undertake a psychoanalysis, or even an analysis, of Sartre’s attitude, except to suggest, very tentatively, that the war may have been a relevant factor. I am more interested in the consequences of his attitude, for at this point in Being and Nothingness Sartre seems to miss a significant opportunity to undertake a full-scale existential analysis of death, one that might have rivalled Heidegger’s. However, he appears determined to refuse it, in particular through a series of repeated denials which all insist on the bad faith inherent in any attempt to confront one’s own death. What Sartre reveals here is perhaps a failure of imagination, for if he is only too familiar with sexual desire – and his descriptions are all the more convincing for that reason – he has, of course, never experienced death. However, in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, death was evidently visible on all sides, and it may well be that his choice to envisage death as something external which does not concern me personally was a wise one, in so far as the emotion generated might have risked derailing his analysis of our freedom-in-situation.5 Be that as it may, it none the less demonstrates a seriously limited approach, which arguably impoverishes Sartre’s text significantly. Death, as we have seen, is an integral part of human facticity. But if that facticity includes our body, or our ‘physiological structure’, this cannot simply be when we are in the prime of life: it also must include our illnesses, our wounds and most especially our continual ageing, for if illness is rare, ageing begins at our birth and cannot be ignored. Eye strain and stomach ache, which are Sartre’s chosen examples in Being and Nothingness, are far from exhausting the range of possible illnesses and are indisputably among the least significant. And if AIDS did not exist in 1943, cancer, TB and many

Sartre and Death

137

other serious diseases were certainly as familiar then as they are today. Slow physical weakening and decline, the inexorable descent towards infirmity, whether sight, hearing, mobility or mental capacity, were – even in the midst of war – still the most common path toward death. And the path toward death is not restricted to the body, it also concerns consciousness, the body for-itself as much as the body in-itself. It is doubtless true, as Sartre is keen to insist, that it is we who decide what attitude to take in the face of illness, ageing and, in the case of terminal illness, death, but this fails to take into account what we might call the psychosomatic dialectic, the dialectic between body and soul, facticity and freedom, life and death. It fails to take into account the fact that serious illness and ageing do not merely affect the body: all my faculties are weakened, including my ability to make choices, my capacity to deal with what happens to me and the lucidity of my consciousness. It is not just desire that clouds and ‘troubles’ consciousness, that makes it heavy and close to swooning; pain and illness can be just as devastating. But in this case, it is not simply a matter of a temporary state from which orgasm can deliver me, and that I may indeed cherish as a sign of my successful and fulfilling relations with my lover; on the contrary, the heaviness of my limbs, the deterioration in my vision and hearing, the confusion of my mind and the somnolence of my consciousness are rather harbingers of death, which is advancing, be it fast or slowly, and which I cannot escape in either pleasure or distraction. The more the body declines and deteriorates, the more difficult it becomes to identify with it as for-itself, the more it seems to resemble a prison where my consciousness languishes and declines in its turn. Sartre’s analyses of death in Being and Nothingness correspond very precisely to his remarks about torture in the 1940s: to insist that I choose the moment when I will give in under torture reveals an almost complete incomprehension of the effect of extreme pain on consciousness, which is weakened and even annihilated by some methods of torture.6 Similarly, to maintain that I am in full control of my attitude towards illness, pain and death reveals the same ignorance or forgetting of the psycho-somatic body and, ultimately, the same dualism that Sartre strives so hard elsewhere to avoid. Neither the passages on love nor those on death in Being and Nothingness give their rightful place to the body – only desire seems truly incarnate in Sartrean phenomenology. As Sartre himself remarked in a 1970 interview: ‘C’est incroyable: je le pensais vraiment’ (It’s incredible: I really thought that!).7

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at a conference marking the centenary of Sartre’s birth in July 2005 at Cérisy la Salle. 2. Hazel Barnes translates ‘infirmité’ as ‘disability’, and ‘infirme’ as ‘crippled’. The sense is broader in French and includes, for example, the infirmity of old age. 3. Cf. ‘La mort est la possibilité de l’impossibilité pure et simple pour le Dasein’, Heidegger, quoted by Derrida 1996: 50.

138 Christina Howells 4. The French reads ‘attendre que ma vie soit une entreprise manquée’ (EN 620), which Barnes translates as ‘to wait with the idea that my life is an enterprise which is lacking’. 5. It is of course true, as I have indicated, that many of Sartre’s literary works deal directly with death and the experience of dying, but without exception these all also deal with the human failure to be free. 6. Sartre certainly recognized this himself in later years; see n. 7. 7. Sartre 1976: 100. The full quotation reads: ‘L’autre jour j’ai rélu la preface que j’avais écrite pour une édition de ces pièces – Les Mouches, Huis clos et d’autres – et j’ai été proprement scandalisé. J’avais écrit ceci: “Quelles que soient les circonstances, en quelque lieu que ce soit, un homme est toujours libre de choisir s’il sera un traˆitre ou non”. Quand j’ai lu cela, je me suis dit: “C’est incroyable; je le pensais vraiment!” . . . [J’avais] conclu que, dans toute circonstance, il y avait toujours un choix possible. C’était faux.’

References Derrida, J. (1996). Apories. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Sartre, J-P. (1976). Situations X: Politique et autobiographie. Paris: Gallimard.

8 Sexual Paradigms Robert C. Solomon

It is a cocktail lounge, well-lit and mirrored, not a bar, martinis and not beer, two strangers – a furtive glance from him, shy recognition from her. It is 1950s American high comedy: boy arouses girl, both are led through 90 minutes of misunderstandings of identity and intention, and, finally, by the end of the popcorn, boy kisses girl with a clean-cut fade-out or panned clip of a postcard horizon. It is one of the dangers of conceptual analysis that the philosopher’s choice of paradigms betrays a personal bias, but it is an exceptional danger of sexual conceptual analysis that one’s choice of paradigms also betrays one’s private fantasies and personal obsessions.1 No doubt that is why, despite their extra-professional interest in the subject, most philosophers would rather write about indirect discourse than intercourse, the philosophy of mind rather than the philosophy of body. In Tom Nagel’s (1969) pioneering effort there are too many recognizable symptoms of liberal American sexual mythology. His analysis is cautious and competent, but absolutely sexless. His Romeo and Juliet exemplify at most a romanticized version of the initial phases of (hetero-)sexual attraction in a casual and innocent pick-up. They ‘arouse’ each other, but there is no indication to what end. They ‘incarnate each other as flesh’ in Sartre’s awkward but precise terminology, but Nagel gives us no clue as to why they should indulge in such a peculiar activity. Presumably a pair of dermatologists or fashion models might have a similar effect on each other, but without the slightest hint of sexual intention. What makes this situation paradigmatically sexual? We may assume, as we would in a Doris Day comedy, that the object of this protracted arousal is sexual intercourse, but we are not told this. Sexuality without content. Liberal sexual mythology takes this Hollywood element of ‘leave it to the imagination’ as its starting point and adds the equally inexplicit suggestion that whatever activities two consenting adults choose as the object of their arousal and its gratification is ‘their business’. In a society with such secrets, pornography is bound to serve a radical end as a vulgar valve of reality. In a philosophical analysis that stops 139

140 Robert C. Solomon

short of the very matter investigated, a bit of perverseness may be necessary just in order to refocus the question. Sexual desire is distinguished, like all desires, by its aims and objects. What are these peculiarly sexual aims and objects? Notice that Nagel employs a fairly standard ‘paradigm case argument’ in his analysis; he begins, ‘certain practices will be perversions if anything is, such as shoe fetishism, bestiality and sadism; other practices, such as unadorned sexual intercourse will not be’ (1969: 5). So we can assume that the end of Romeo and Juliet’s tryst will be intercourse – we do not know whether ‘adorned’ or not. But what is it that makes intercourse the paradigm of sexual activity – its biological role in conception, its heterosexuality, its convenience for mutual orgasm? Would Nagel’s drama still serve as a sexual paradigm if Juliet turns out to be a virgin, or if Romeo and Juliet find that they are complementarily sadomasochistic, if Romeo is in drag, if they are both knee fetishists? Why does Nagel choose two strangers? Why not, as in the days of sexual moralism, a happily married couple enjoying their seventh anniversary? Or is not the essence of sex, as Sartre so brutally argues, Romeo and Juliet’s mutual attempts to possess each other, with each one’s own enjoyment only a secondary and essentially distracting effect? Are we expected to presume the most prominent paradigm, at least since Freud, the lusty ejaculation of Romeo into the submissive, if not passive, Juliet? Suppose Juliet is in fact a prostitute, skilfully mocking the signs of innocent arousal: is this a breach of the paradigm, or might not such subsequent, ‘unadorned’ intercourse be just the model that Nagel claims to defend? To what end does Romeo arouse Juliet? And to what end does Juliet become affected and in turn excite Romeo? In this exemplary instance, I would think that ‘unadorned’ intercourse would be perverse, or at least distasteful, in the extreme. It would be different, however, if the paradigm were our seven-year married couple, for in such cases ‘adorned’ intercourse might well be something of a rarity. In homosexual encounters, in the frenzy of adolescent virginal petting, in cases in which intercourse is restricted for temporary medical or political reasons, arousal may be no different, even though intercourse cannot be the end. And it is only in the crudest cases of physiological need that the desire for intercourse is the sole or even the leading component in the convoluted motivation of sexuality. A nineteen-year-old sailor back after having discussed nothing but sex on a three-month cruise may be so aroused, but that surely is not the nature of Juliet’s arousal. Romeo may remind her of her father, or of her favourite philosophy professor, and he may inspire respect, fear or curiosity. He may simply arouse self-consciousness or embarrassment. Any of these attitudes may be dominant, but none is particularly sexual. Sexuality has an essential bodily dimension, and this might well be described as the ‘incarnation’ or ‘submersion’ of a person into his body. The end of this desire is interpersonal communication; but where Sartre gives a

Sexual Paradigms

141

complex theory of the nature of this communication, Nagel gives us only an empty notion of ‘multi-level interpersonal awareness’. Presumably, the mutual arousal that is the means to this awareness is enjoyable in itself. But it is important that Nagel resists the current (W.) Reichian-American fetish for the wonders of the genital orgasm, for he does not leap to the facile conclusion that the aim of sexual activity is mutual or at least personal orgasm. It is here that Nagel opens a breach with liberal sexual mythology, one that might at first appear absurd because of his total neglect of the role of the genitalia and orgasm in sexuality. But we have an over-genitalized conception of sexuality, and, if sexual satisfaction involves and even requires orgasm, it does not follow that orgasm is the goal of the convoluted sexual games we play with each other. Orgasm is the ‘end’ of sexual activity, perhaps, but only in the sense that swallowing is the ‘end’ of tasting a Viennese torte. There was a time, and it was not long ago and may come soon again, when sexuality required defending. It had to be argued that we had a right to sex, not for any purpose other than our personal enjoyment. But that defence has turned stale and sexual deprivation is no longer our problem. The ‘swollen bladder’ model of repressed sexuality may have been convincing in sex-scared bourgeois Vienna of 1905, but not today, where the problem is not sexual deprivation but sexual dissatisfaction. The fetishism of the orgasm, now shared by women as well as men, threatens our sex lives with becoming anti-personal and mechanical, anxiety-filled athletic arenas with mutual multiple orgasm its goal. Behind much of this unhappiness and anxiety, ironically, stands the liberal defence of sexuality as enjoyment. It is one of the virtues of Nagel’s essay that he begins to overcome this oppressive liberal mythology. But at the same time he relies on it for his support and becomes trapped in it. The result is an account which displays the emptiness we have pointed out and the final note of despair with which he ends his essay. Liberal sexual mythology appears to stand on a tripod of mutually supporting platitudes: (i) and foremost, that the essential aim – even the sole aim – of sex is enjoyment; (ii) that sexual activity is, and ought to be, essentially private activity; and (iii) that any sexual activity is as valid as any other. The first platitude was once a radical proposition, a reaction to the conservative and pious belief that sexual activity was activity whose end was reproduction, the serving of God’s will or natural law. Kant, for example, always good for a shocking opinion in the realm of normative ethics, suggests that sexual lust is an appetite with an end intended by nature, and that any sexual activity contrary to that end is ‘unnatural and revolting’, by which one ‘makes himself an object of abomination and stands bereft of all reverence of any kind’.2 It was Freud who destroyed this long-standing paradigm, in identifying sexuality as ‘discharge of tension’ (physical and psychological), which he simply equated with ‘pleasure’ regardless of the areas of the body, or what activities, or how many people happened to be


involved. Sex was thus defined as self-serving, activity for its own sake, with pleasure as its only principle. If Freud is now accused of sexual conservatism, it is necessary to remind ourselves that he introduced the radical paradigm that is now used against him. Since Freud’s classic efforts, the conception of sexuality as a means to other ends, whether procreation or pious love, has become bankrupt in terms of the currency of opinion. Even radical sexual ideology has confined its critique to the social and political abuses of this liberal platitude without openly rejecting it. The second platitude is a hold-over from more conservative days, in which sexual activity, like defecation, menstruation and the bodily reactions to illness, was considered distasteful, if not shameful and to be hidden from view. Yet this conservative platitude is as essential as the first, for the typically utilitarian argument in defence of sexuality as enjoyment is based on the idea that sex is private activity and, when confined to ‘consenting adults’, should be left as a matter of taste. Sex is, we are reminded by liberals, a natural appetite, and therefore a matter of taste. The platitude of privacy also bolsters the third principle, still considered a radical principle by many, that any sexual activity is as valid as any other. Again, the utilitarian argument prevails, that private and mutually consenting activity between adults, no matter how distasteful it might be to others and no matter how much we may think its enthusiasts to be depraved, is ‘their own business’. Nagel’s analysis calls this tri-part ideology to his side, although he clearly attempts to go beyond it as well. The platitude of enjoyment functions only loosely in his essay, and at one point he makes it clear that sexuality need not aim at enjoyment. (‘It may be that . . . perfection as sex is less enjoyable than certain perversions; and if enjoyment is considered very important, that might outweigh considerations of sexual perfection in determining rational preference’ (1969: 16–17).) His central notion of ‘arousal,’ however, is equivocal. On the one hand, arousal is itself not necessarily enjoyable, particularly if it fails to be accompanied with expectations of release. But, on the other hand, Nagel’s ‘arousal’ plays precisely the same role in his analysis that ‘tension’ (or ‘cathexis’) plays in Freud, and though the arousal itself is not enjoyable, its release is. The impression we get from Nagel, which Freud makes explicit, is that sexual activity is the intentional arousal both of self and other in order to enjoy its release. On this interpretation, Nagel’s analysis is in line with post-Freudian liberal theory. Regarding the second platitude, Nagel’s analysis does not mention it, but rather it appears to be presupposed throughout that sexuality is a private affair. One might repeat that the notion of privacy is more symptomatic of his analysis itself. One cannot imagine J. L. Austin spending a dozen pages describing the intentions and inclinations involved in a public performance of making a promise or launching a ship without mentioning the performance itself. Yet Nagel spends that much space giving us the preliminaries

Sexual Paradigms

143

of sexuality without ever quite breaching the private sector in which sexual activity is to be found. The third platitude emerges only slowly in Nagel’s essay. He begins by chastising an approach to that same conclusion by a radical ‘skeptic’, who argues of sexual desires, as ‘appetites’: ‘Either they are sexual or they are not; sexuality does not admit of imperfection, or perversion, or any other such qualification’ (1969: 7). Nagel’s analysis goes beyond this skepticism in important ways, yet he does conclude that ‘any bodily contact between a man and a woman that gives them sexual pleasure [italics mine], is a possible vehicle for the system of multi-level interpersonal awareness that I have claimed is the basic psychological content of sexual interaction’ (1969: 15). Here the first platitude is partially employed to support the third, presumably with the second implied. Notice again that Nagel has given us no indication what distinguishes ‘sexual pleasure’ from other pleasures – whether bodily pleasures or the enjoyment of conquest or domination, seduction or submission, sleeping with the president’s daughter or earning thirty dollars. To knock down a tripod, one need kick out only one of its supporting legs. I for one would not wish to advocate, along with several recent sexual pundits, an increased display of fornication and fellatio in public places, nor would I view the return of ‘sexual morality’ as a desirable state of affairs. Surprisingly, it is the essential enjoyment of sex that is the least palatable of the liberal myths. No one would deny that sex is enjoyable, but it does not follow that sexuality is the activity of ‘pure enjoyment’ and that ‘gratification’, or ‘pure physical pleasure’, that is, orgasm, is its end. Sex is indeed pleasurable, but, as Aristotle argued against the hedonists of his day, this enjoyment accompanies sexual activity and its ends, but is not that activity or these ends. We enjoy being sexually satisfied; we are not satisfied by our enjoyment. In fact, one might reasonably hypothesize that the performance of any activity, pleasurable or not, which is as intensely promoted and obsessively pursued as sex in America would provide tremendous gratification. (One might further speculate on the fact that recent American politics shows that ‘every (white, male Christian) American boy’s dream of becoming President’ seems to encourage the exploitation of all three sexual platitudes of enjoyment, privacy, and ‘anything goes’ (cf. H. Kissinger, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’).) If sexuality does not essentially aim at pleasure, does it have any purpose? Jean-Paul Sartre has given us an alternative to the liberal theory in his Being and Nothingness, in which he argues that our sexual relations with others, like all our various relationships with others, are to be construed as conflicts, modelled after Hegel’s parable of master and slave. Sexual desire is not desire for pleasure, and pleasure is more likely to distract us from sexuality than to deepen our involvement. For Sartre, sexual desire is the desire to possess, to


gain recognition of one’s own freedom at the expense of the other. By ‘incarnating’ and degrading him/her in flesh, one reduces him/her to an object. Sadism is but an extension of this domination over the other. Or one allows himself to be ‘incarnated’ as a devious route to the same end, making the other his/her sexual slave. Sexual activity concentrates its attention on the least personal, most inert parts of the body – breasts, thighs, stomach – and emphasizes awkward and immobile postures and activities. On this model degradation is the central activity of sex, to convince the other that he/she is a slave, to persuade the other of one’s own power whether it be through the skills of sexual technique or through the passive demands of being sexually served. Intercourse has no privileged position in this model, except that intercourse, particularly in these liberated times in which it has become a contest, is ideal for this competition for power and recognition. And no doubt Sartre who, like Freud, adopts a paradigmatically male perspective, senses that intercourse is more likely to be degrading to the woman, who thus begins at a disadvantage. Sartre’s notion of sexuality, taken seriously, would be enough to keep us out of bed for a month. Surely, we must object, something has been left out of account, for example, the two-person Mitsein that Sartre himself suggests in the same book. It is impossible for us to delve into the complex ontology that leads Sartre into this pessimistic model, but its essential structure is precisely what we need to carry us beyond the liberal mythology. According to Sartre sexuality is interpersonal communication with the body as its medium. Sartre’s mistake, if we may be brief, is his narrow constriction of the message of that communication to mutual degradation and conflict. Nagel, who accepts Sartre’s communication model but in line with the liberal mythology, seeks to reject its pessimistic conclusions, makes a mistake in the opposite direction. He accepts the communication model, but leaves it utterly without content. What is communicated, he suggests, is arousal. But, as we have seen, arousal is too broad a notion; we must know arousal of what for what, to what end. Nagel’s notion of ‘arousal’ and ‘interpersonal awareness’ gives us an outline of the grammar of the communication model, but no semantics. One might add that sexual activity in which what is aroused and intended are pleasurable sensations alone is a limiting and rare case. A sensation is only pleasurable or enjoyable, not in itself, but in the context of the meaning of the activity in which it is embedded. This is as true of orgasm as it is of a hard passion-bite on the shoulder. This view of sexuality answers some strong questions which the liberal model leaves a mystery. If sex is pure physical enjoyment, why is sexual activity between persons far more satisfying than masturbation, where, if we accept recent physiological studies, orgasm is at its highest intensity and the postcoital period is cleansed of its interpersonal hassles and arguments? On the Freudian model, sex with other people (‘objects’) becomes a matter of ‘secondary process’, with masturbation primary. On the communication

Sexual Paradigms

145

model, masturbation is like talking to yourself; possible, even enjoyable, but clearly secondary to sexuality in its broader interpersonal context. (It is significant that even this carnal solipsism is typically accompanied by imaginings and pictures – ‘No masturbation without representation’ perhaps.) If sex is physical pleasure, then the fetish of the genital orgasm is no doubt justifiable, but then why in our orgasm-cluttered sex lives are we so dissatisfied? Because orgasm is not the ‘end’ of sex but its resolution, and obsessive concentration on reaching climax effectively overwhelms or distorts whatever else is being said sexually. It is this focus on orgasm that has made Sartre’s model more persuasive; for the battle over the orgasm, whether in selfish or altruistic guise (‘my orgasm first’ or ‘I’ll give you the best ever’) has become an unavoidable medium for conflict and control. ‘Unadorned sexual intercourse’ on this model becomes the ultimate perversion, since it is the sexual equivalent of hanging up the telephone without saying anything. Even an obscene telephone caller has a message to convey. Sexual activity consists in speaking what we might call ‘body language’. It has its own grammar, delineated by the body, and its own phonetics of touch and movement. Its unit of meaningfulness, the bodily equivalent of a sentence, is the gesture. No doubt one could add considerably to its vocabulary, and perhaps it could be possible to discuss world politics or the mind–body problem by an appropriate set of invented gestures. But body language is essentially expressive, and its content is limited to interpersonal attitudes and feelings – shyness, domination, fear, submissiveness and dependence, love or hatred or indifference, lack of confidence and embarrassment, shame, jealousy, possessiveness. There is little value in stressing the overworked point that such expressions are ‘natural’ expressions, as opposed to verbal expressions of the same attitudes and feelings. In our highly verbal society, it may well be that verbal expression, whether it be poetry or clumsy blurting, feels more natural than the use of our bodies. Yet it does seem true that some attitudes, for example, tenderness and trust, domination and passivity, are best expressed sexually. Love, it seems, is not best expressed sexually, for its sexual expression is indistinguishable from the expressions of a number of other attitudes. Possessiveness, mutual recognition, ‘being-with’, and conflict are expressed by body language almost essentially, virtually as its deep structure, and here Sartre’s model obtains its plausibility. According to Nagel, ‘perversion’ is ‘truncated or incomplete versions of the complete configuration’ (1969: 13). But again, his emphasis is entirely on the form of ‘interpersonal awareness’ rather than its content. For example, he analyzes sadism as ‘the concentration on the evocation of passive self-awareness in others . . . which impedes awareness of himself as a bodily subject of passion in the required sense’. But surely sadism is not so much a breakdown in communication (any more than the domination of a conversation by one speaker, with the agreement of his listener, is a breach of language) as an excessive expression of a particular content, namely the


attitude of domination, perhaps mixed with hatred, fear and other negative attitudes. Similarly, masochism is not simply the relinquishing of one’s activity (an inability to speak, in a sense), for the masochist may well be active in inviting punishment from his sadistic partner. Masochism is excessive expression of an attitude of victimization, shame or inferiority. Moreover, it is clear that there is not the slightest taint of ‘perversion’ in homosexuality, which need differ from heterosexuality only in its mode of resolution. Fetishism and bestiality certainly do constitute perversions, since the first is the same as, for example, talking to someone else’s shoes, and the second is like discussing Spinoza with a moderately intelligent sheep. This model also makes it evident why Nagel chose as his example a couple of strangers; one has far more to say, for one can freely express one’s fantasies as well as the truth, to a stranger. A husband and wife of seven years have probably been repeating the same messages for years, and their sexual activity now is probably no more than an abbreviated ritual incantation of the lengthy conversations they had years before. One can imagine Romeo and Juliet climbing into bed together each with a spectacular set of expectations and fantasies, trying to overwhelm each other with extravagant expressions and experiments. But it may be, accordingly, that they won’t understand each other, or, as the weekend plods on, sex, like any extended conversation, tends to become either more truthful or more incoherent. Qua body language, sex admits of at least two forms of perversion: one deviance of form, the other deviance in content. There are the techniques of sexuality, overly celebrated in our society, and there are the attitudes that these techniques allegedly express. Nagel and most theorists have concentrated on perversions in technique, deviations in the forms of sexual activity. But it seems to me that the more problematic perversions are the semantic deviations, of which the most serious are those involving insincerity, the bodily equivalent of the lie. Entertaining private fantasies and neglecting one’s real sexual partner is thus an innocent semantic perversion, while pretended tenderness and affection that reverses itself soon after orgasm is a potentially vicious perversion. However, again joining Nagel, I would argue that perverse sex is not necessarily bad or immoral sex. Pretense is the premise of imagination as well as of falsehood, and sexual fantasies may enrich our lives far more than sexual realities alone. Perhaps it is an unfortunate comment on the poverty of contemporary life that our fantasies have become so confined, that our sexuality has been forced to serve needs which far exceed its expressive capacity. That is why the liberal mythology has been so disastrous, for it has rendered unconscious the expressive functions of sex in its stress on enjoyment and, in its platitude of privacy, has reduced sexuality to each man’s/woman’s private language, first spoken clumsily and barely articulately on wedding nights and in the back seats of Fords. It is thus understandable why sex is so utterly important in our lives, and why it is typically so unsatisfactory.

Sexual Paradigms

147

Notes 1. I confess, for example, that certain male biases infiltrate my own analysis. I thank Janice Moulton for pointing this out to me. 2. Kant 1971, IV, pt. I, cli. 1, sec. 7.

References Kant, I. (1971). Metaphysics of Ethics. Tr. J. W. Semple. Edinburgh: Clark. (Original German publication: 1796.) Nagel, T. (1969). ‘Sexual perversion’. Journal of Philosophy LXVI, 1: 5–17.

9 Some Patterns of Identification and Otherness Phyllis Sutton Morris

Introduction The notion of the lived body is perhaps one of the most important contributions which phenomenology has made to philosophy. Within the Western philosophical tradition, important works often seem to have sprung fullblown from disembodied spirits, much as Athena is said to have sprung from the head of Zeus. A sense of embodiment often seems to be entirely lacking in recent analytic philosophical writings on the mind/body problem and on personal identity. The first section of this chapter addresses this point in more detail. In spite of the importance of the notion of the lived body, however, phenomenologists have often offered the distinction between the lived body and the body as object of knowledge as if these concepts were quite clear. Where detailed descriptions of lived body experience have been presented, these have often been lacking in breadth. Within the context of this paper, some difficulties will be identified in the ways Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir have described lived body experience. Finally, the paper will sketch some additional directions for analysis of lived body experience. The chapter as a whole is intended to provide a basis for further detailed critical analysis and phenomenological description.1

Treatment of the body within the western philosophical tradition and within recent analytical philosophy If pragmatism and recent continental philosophy are excluded from consideration, it seems to me that five main ways of construing the relation between the body and the self or person can be identified within the western philosophical tradition: 1. The body is something wholly different from the true self; the relationship is construed as one of opposition, perhaps hostility. 148

Some Patterns of Identification and Otherness

149

For example, Plato, following the Pythagoreans, spoke of the body as a prison. 2. The body is part of the person, but a lesser part, to be transcended (for example, Plato speaking through Socrates in The Symposium) or to be used by the mind (for example, Aristotle discussing the role of the senses in knowledge). 3. The body is something wholly different from the person; the relationship is construed as one of interaction or cooperation, with the body clearly playing an inferior role. For example, Descartes doubted the existence of the body, but later acknowledged the usefulness of the sensory data it provides. With the exception of Aristotle, these ways of understanding the relation of the body to the person are rationalist. Perhaps it is not surprising that philosophers who prize reason over the use of the senses tend also to treat the body with a certain degree of condescension. One might have expected, however, that the empiricists’ epistemological convictions would lead naturally to a central role for the body and to considerable emphasis on the way people experience their own bodies as well as what is external. Instead we find the following: 4. The body is something indifferent, either relatively or totally. For example, Hume, looking into himself, is unable to discover any continuing datum. He overlooks the most obvious candidate, one’s continuing sense of being an embodied experiencer. Perhaps this is due in part to his assumption that sensory impressions are isolated bits arriving on the stage of consciousness through separate entrances. Again, Locke’s distinction between a man, who is identifiable as a body, and a person, who is defined as a consciousness linked through memory to his own past, has continued to generate revisions and odd speculations about whether persons, qua memory streams, can change bodies or undergo fusion or fission. For some contemporary defenders of the Lockean memory theory, the body continues to occupy an indifferent position; take, for example, the following comment by Anthony Quinton: In our general relations with other human beings their bodies are for the most part intrinsically unimportant. We use them as convenient recognition devices enabling us to locate without difficulty the persisting character and memory complexes in which we are interested, which we love or like.2

150 Phyllis Sutton Morris

Some of the contemporary analytic philosophers who discuss personal identity, however, acknowledge the importance of the body: 5. The body is construed as a central element of personhood, for reasons which are theoretical and/or explanatory. Even in this case, however, little or no attention seems to be given to actual experience of bodies, whether one’s own or others’ bodies. When there is discussion of experience of bodies, it tends to be a peculiar experience. G. E. Moore looked at his hand as if it were any physical object. A. J. Ayer wrote of hearing someone speak and wondering whether that person was a cleverly designed robot. Some examples of the important but theoretical role played by the body in recent analytic philosophy are these: the body is taken as a necessary condition of being able to distinguish real from apparent memories; the body is seen as the locus of certain kinds of attribution, such as M-predicates and P-predicates; brain processes are seen as identical to, or distinguishable from, conscious experiences.3 In the Western philosophical tradition, then, the human body seems to have been construed predominantly as something other than the true self or as a theoretical object, when it has not been ignored. Furthermore, the body has usually been assigned a negative or lesser value relative to the mind. It is initially very tempting, I think, to suggest that the Western philosophical tradition has treated the body primarily as an object of knowledge, and has virtually ignored phenomenological consideration of the body as lived. There may be some truth in this suggestion. For the remainder of this paper, however, I would like to explore a quite different possibility. Suppose that instead of ignoring the lived body, the philosophical tradition in various ways seeks to incorporate that experience? In order to lend some plausibility to this proposal, I shall have to show, at the very least, that lived experience of our own bodies is complex and rich enough to account for the sense of otherness which so often emerges in the writings of philosophers. It will be convenient to begin this task by taking a critical look at some of the ways lived body experience has been described so far within the phenomenological tradition.

Some difficulties in phenomenological treatments of the lived body: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir The notion of the lived body as described in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir does not seem to be sufficiently rich to account for the ways in which the philosophical tradition has dealt with the body. Still


151

less do those descriptions do justice to the full range of lived body experience in non-philosophical contexts.4 These criticisms can be made more specific. (a) Sartre’s account of the lived body presupposes his account of the intentionality of consciousness. He adopts that element of Husserl’s doctrine, which claims that all consciousness is directed toward some object. In his accounts of the lived body, Sartre emphasizes that the body is the centre of action, the unutilizable instrument within hodological space, and the centre in relation to which perceptual objects are oriented. The body’s central position is given non-positionally; the lived body is not itself given as an additional object of awareness (BN 434). These descriptions of the lived body are accurate and illuminating. It can be shown, however, that there are many common lived experiences which do not yield the body as centre of action or center of the perceptual field; furthermore, these are not cases of taking one’s own body as an object of knowledge. In fact, Sartre’s description of the way in which the other person’s arrival on the scene ‘decenters’ my instrumental world might be taken as one example of this; Sartre, however, treats this as a separate ‘ontological dimension’ of the body. (BN 446) (b) Sartre’s descriptions of the way we live our bodies in relation to other persons are penetrating, but also incomplete. Sartre says, ‘the original bond with the Other first arises in connection with the relation between my body and the Other’s body’ (BN 471). There are two basic forms that this relation can take. To the extent that we experience the other person as an object, he is perceived as dangerous. He is not just a material object, but a ‘psychic object’, a ‘transcendence-transcended’, someone who can organize my instrumental world around his own actions and intentions. He thus alienates me from a sense of my own body as center of action.5 The element of alienating conflict is even more explicit when I live my own body and actions as the object of another person’s gaze and judgement. Even though this kind of mediation is a condition of my important capacity to reflect, my shame before that gaze is what makes it hellish to be with others. Although Simone de Beauvoir holds out the possibility of reciprocal relations between men and women, her account of how men have historically viewed woman as the Other leaves little room for a positive experience; women have been objectified in such a manner as to humiliate and belittle them or to make them mysterious objects of fear. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, then, treat experience of and by others as a real or potential conflict situation or power struggle. Sartre suggests that cessation of the subject/object power struggle is sought through the sexual caress which clouds the consciousness of both partners. In such caressing, the body of each partner is brought as close as possible to material thinghood or ‘flesh’; the body is lived as passive and inert (BN 507). (Joining with others against a common third person or group is another way out of the power struggle between partners suggested by Sartre, but this involves redirecting the struggle rather than eliminating it.)


Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir have certainly offered many illuminating descriptions of lived body experience in relation to other people. In their emphasis on hostility, estrangement and conflict, however, they present an extremely impoverished picture of that experience. Furthermore, Sartre’s treatment of sexual touching as a descent to thinghood seems aberrant. The remainder of this paper will be devoted to showing some of the directions needed for a more complete account of lived body experience.

Some patterns of otherness and identification in lived body experience Some very general guidelines can be sketched as a framework for describing lived experience of our own bodies: 1. An experience can be one in which we fully identify with the body, partially identify with it, or distance ourselves from the body. The tendency has been for phenomenologists such as Sartre to think of the last-mentioned type of experience as objectification. While this is a possible form of lived body experience, and has been described as a dichotomy between subject/object or an internal/external perspective, attention may also be focused on distancing, which takes place apart from objectification. The distinction here is between the body as center of lived experience and living the body at the periphery of experience. This, as we will see, is one way of experiencing the body as other. 2. Identification with the body, partial identification with the body and distancing from the body can be experienced as having positive or negative value or as a value-neutral experience. Here, the importance of cultural, social and religious beliefs and practices emerges as central to the quality of lived body experience. 3. The body can experience itself as closed or turned inward, or, on the other hand, turned outward toward objects or other persons. In some kinds of experience, one can do both simultaneously. 4. In some of the above modes, one can experience one’s body in a range of intensities, from the most intense to the very relaxed. 5. One’s lived body experience can encompass the whole body, or can be focused on one or more parts of the body. This list could no doubt be expanded. Present discussion will concentrate primarily, although not exclusively, on the first two sets of characteristics: the body’s sense of itself as central or peripheral, and the positive, negative or neutral value placed on that experiencing. Two areas of lived experience will be emphasized: the body’s experience of itself in health and illness or


153

injury, and lived body experiences which emerge in intersubjective touching. There are two reasons for choosing these areas, aside from their intrinsic importance. First, there has been a tendency for Sartre and other phenomenologists to describe the lived body primarily in terms of its role in practical action and to focus on visual perception. There may be cultural and/or masculine biases involved in that selection, but in any case it seemed to be worth expanding in other directions. Second, it may be that the philosophical tradition has been in touch with certain strongly positive values to be attached to the experience of one’s body as peripheral, in contrast with such philosophers as Sartre, who interpret otherness as estrangement and objectification. As philosophers, we need to be concerned with the full range of lived body experience. Some possible lived body experiences in health and illness or injury 1. Suppose (a) a condition of abundant good health; (b) identification with the body as the centre of one’s experience; and (c) positive value attached to that identification. Here there is a joyous sense of total well-being; a sense of energy radiating outward so that one’s practical activities are carried out with ease; a sense of being fully gathered within oneself and yet intensely alive to one’s surroundings: the dank smell of seaweed mixed with the salty smell of the breeze, the dozens of shades of blue and green and brown in the moving sea. There is intense enjoyment of motion for its own sake. The phenomenologists’ tendency to speak of lived body experience in practical activity needs to be supplemented by descriptions of the lived body engaged in other kinds of movement: the small boy racing barefoot through a field; the mother rocking her child; the vacationer swimming into the surf; the dancer moving to music. Phenomenologists have written of the body’s gestures as forms of speech and communication, but there is also aesthetic expression involved; one can live one’s rhythmic bodily movement as a form of spiritual communion. Such movement also plays a restorative role, as suggested by the many forms of recreation that involve movement that seems to have no other point than to re-establish one’s sense of joyous identification with one’s own body. 2. Let’s try a variation: (a) a condition of abundant good health; (b) identification with the body as the center of one’s lived experience; and (c) negative value attached to that identification. Two kinds of example may be mentioned in this connection. In the context of religious or cultural condemnation of instinctual urges, one’s lived experience of identification with a vitally healthy body may lead to a sense of guilt or shame. Another kind of example might occur in cases where someone


was trying to concentrate on some important non-sensory or theoretical activity, and one’s sense of identification with a healthy body could produce experiences ranging from mild impatience at having to sit quietly on a hard library chair for a long time, to rage at the distraction from what one is trying to do. Either of these general kinds of response might be sufficient to lead someone to distance himself from his healthy body. This would lead to the next variation. 3. The situation here is one of (a) abundant good health; (b) a sense of one’s body as peripheral to one’s present experience; and (c) positive value attached to that sense of distance. One need not imagine a Plato seeking eternity in a heaven of Forms. This may be what any ordinary student or scholar has to do in order to achieve ordinary concentration. It should be noted, in particular, that there is a sense of the body as other, but it would be incorrect to describe this as objectification. One’s focus of attention is on the activity at hand, not on one’s body at all; nor is the body experienced as estranged in this case. One can easily shift back to the body’s centrality in experience when the books are closed and it is time for a swim. 4. Another variation can be considered: (a) the body is healthy; but (b) one has a sense of being dissociated from one’s body; and (c) one places either a negative value on this distancing, or is indifferent to it. One thinks of cases in which a person is physically healthy, but is depressed because of the breakdown in his interpersonal relations or a failure in his projects. 5. At the other end of the scale, there are forms of lived body experience when (a) there is serious illness or injury; (b) there is full identification with the body as center of one’s experience; and (c) there is a negative value attached to this identification. Here one has a sense of being closed in, weighted down, heavy with pain; it is difficult to move. One’s sense of what is going on around one is blurred and confused. There is additional psychological pain involved in being incapacitated, dependent, helpless. 6. There is an odd variation on this, when someone (a) is seriously ill or injured; (b) fully identifies with the body in that condition; but (c) places positive value on that identification.


155

Perhaps this is a neurotic response: the sick person wants to punish or inconvenience a spouse or child who must provide care, or the sick person fears responsibility and enjoys dependence. In some contexts, the illness or injury might be valued as warranted punishment for some evil deed. A qualitatively different kind of response is described in Dalton Trumbo’s horrifying anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. The protagonist has lost both arms and legs, and has been so mutilated that he has lost the senses of sight, hearing, smell and taste. He lives primarily in his memories until he decides to attempt to regain a time sense to give some structure to his passing memories and imaginings. After trying and failing a number of times, there is a remarkable scene in which he discovers the sudden warming of his skin, which marks the dawn. His sense of triumph may be echoed in the experience of others, less seriously damaged, who retain a strong identification with the body while they overcome obstacles to achieve certain kinds of mastery. 7. Another variation is to be found where there is (a) serious illness or injury; (b) distancing from the body; and (c) either a negative value placed on this distancing or an indifference to it. One is no longer heavy with pain, but simply absent; there is a loss of interest in both the body and one’s surroundings. Some descriptions of old people who have been shut away and forgotten suggest this kind of experience. 8. An important variation must still be mentioned: (a) one is seriously ill or injured (or dying); (b) one has achieved a distance from one’s body; and (c) a positive value is placed on that distance. One finds here a sense of collecting one’s powers,6 concentrating one’s energies with an inner force in order to transcend the sense of pain or heaviness, the dependence on others, the fear of incapacity. When the physical pain becomes peripheral, there is a renewed sense of wholeness which may take the form of offering comfort to one’s distressed friends in cheerful banter. Who could fail to recognize Socrates, distancing himself from the increasing heaviness in his limbs after he has drunk the hemlock, joking with his friends who want to know how they should bury him: ‘You’ll have to catch me first!’ These descriptions surely do not exhaust the possible forms of lived body experience in connection with health and illness. They should suggest, however, some of the various ways in which ordinary people experience the body as something other, but not necessarily as an alien object. I would like to offer additional support for this by offering a very brief sketch of some of the ways in which a sense of distance and otherness can play a positive as


well as a negative role in lived body experience of intersubjective touching and not-touching. My purpose here is to suggest ways of expanding the very meager range of possibilities emphasized by Sartre and de Beauvoir. Some possible lived body experiences in connection with intersubjective touching In some intersubjective situations there is no touching at all. In many social contexts this can have a positive value; there is often a relaxed sense of reaching out toward others in speech and through gestures, but a distance is maintained as a mark of mutual respect. In other intersubjective situations, however, such distance is experienced as something indifferent or negative. The tiny infant who is not held and caressed soon withers away and dies; we can only guess at the lived experience in such a case. The spouse who is never touched by his partner except in the course of ‘fulfilling marital duties’ may develop a sense of estrangement from his body, as well as from his partner. Among friends and family members, gentle touching plays an important role in expressing affection, encouragement and empathy. One lives one’s body as responsive to others in warm reciprocity. In some situations, touching and being touched by others may intensify one’s lived sense of being different from the other person, but this is a strongly positive element in the situation. For example, the parent lives her own body as large and strong in relation to the small child who has been hurt and seeks comfort in her arms. One can live one’s adult body as something weak or helpless in relation to a strong and healthy friend who offers a sympathetic hug in a distressing situation; the touch itself alters one’s lived experience as there is a renewal of strength. There is an intensification of lived body experience when touching between people becomes heavier, as in the case of exchanging blows or in sexual exploration. In striking someone else, one’s body is tightly wound up in this action; there is a sense of one’s energy becoming concentrated in the arm and hand that deliver the blow; perhaps because of the narrowness of focus, there is a sense of blindness. To strike in anger may be experienced positively, as an exhilarating form of recompense, but often among civilized people one’s sense of identification with the physical violence is accompanied or followed by a deep sense of alienation from one’s better or true self. One’s lived experience, when one is struck by another person, can be quite variable, ranging from a sense of identification and withdrawal in pain and defeat, or alienation from one’s body in protective indifference. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir have both emphasized ways in which relations between the sexes can entail objectifying the other in conflict situations. Sartre’s lengthy description of the caress as an incarnation of both parties suggests a kind of depersonalization. I believe this is in part because he errs in claiming the body is fundamentally passive and inert (BN 507).


157

While these descriptions may accurately portray many lived relationships, they distort by their one-sidedness. Within the context of a mutual love relationship, the sexual caress does not depersonalize either party; there is an intensified sense of identification with one’s body, to be sure, and an intensified sense of one’s body as different from the other’s, but this can be experienced as a deeply vital and active power to give love and to receive it, to offer intense mutual pleasure and peace and a sense of sanctuary. The meaning of intersubjective touching is obviously quite variable from culture to culture, between persons of different social status, degrees of intimacy, sex and age. This paper has only suggested a few of the ways in which a sense of lived otherness can have a far more complex range of meanings, many of them positive, than is usually acknowledged by Sartre and de Beauvoir. ∗

∗

∗

This paper has focused on some of the ways in which there is lived body experience. It began with the observation that the Western philosophical tradition has tended to treat the body as something other or lesser than the true self, or as a theoretical object. While it is tempting to think that philosophers have done so because they ignore lived body experience, this paper has argued that that notion is in need of considerable expansion and clarification. In particular, it has been shown that lived experience can include, in very positive ways, a sense of the body as peripheral to the centre of experience and also a sense of one’s body as different from the bodies of other persons. In neither case is the body’s lived sense of otherness necessarily an estrangement. This is surely not a totally new insight. To take a few examples, Heraclitus valued opposition and interchange, as well as a search for the underlying logos. Among phenomenologists, Marcel has emphasized positive forms of intersubjectivity, as well as the elusiveness of the lived body-subject. To the extent that there has been a tendency, however, to equate otherness with objectification and power struggles, it is hoped that these remarks might make a difference. One final note of clarification is needed. The lived body is emphasized by phenomenologists in part as a way of undercutting Cartesian dualism. I am sympathetic with that aim, even though I doubt that lived body experience can be treated as the primary support for any particular metaphysical position. This paper has emphasized some of the ways in which lived experience can present the body as peripheral. Lest any dualist believe that he can make an ontological profit from these descriptions, an analogy between distancing oneself from one’s whole body and distancing oneself from part of one’s body may help to undercut that strategy. As a gourmet, I may identify strongly and positively with my stomach, but as a seasick traveller, I may try with all my powers of concentration to distance myself from that offending


organ. Surely there is no shift in the ontological status of the stomach in these two cases, however! The same observation can be extended to the body as a whole, and to its richly varied appearance in our lived experience.

Notes 1. I am greatly indebted to Russell T. Blackwood for helpful discussion of some of the issues treated in this paper. 2. Quinton 1975: 64. 3. The robot example is from Ayer 1963: 107. See Williams 1964: 325 and 329 for his account of the role of the body in distinguishing true from apparent memories. P. F. Strawson 1959 speaks of M-predicates (those applicable to material objects) and P-predicates (those applicable to conscious persons). Place 1956 defends the identity theory. 4. Sartre BN; Beauvoir 1961, esp. xvi–xxi. So far as I know, de Beauvoir’s book is the only full-length phenomenological work by a woman which addresses the experience of the lived body in some detail. 5. I agree with Richard M. Zaner’s criticism that Sartre’s account of intentionality makes it impossible on principle to have a genuine subject–subject relationship, but my reasons are different. Zaner notes that Sartre says I know the other in the same way the other knows me. But Zaner also seems to think that Sartre says that being an object for someone is the same as being a physical thing. Zaner thus fails to do justice to Sartre’s very important distinction between material objects (for example, the body as a corpse or as an object studied by physiologists) and ‘psychic objects’ (for example, the ego discovered in reflection, or the other person seen as a ‘synthetic form in action’, BN 506). Perhaps this is why Zaner also suggests that the other’s body is not involved in that most fundamental activity, his gazing at me. See Zaner 1971: 60, 100, 120–1, 125. 6. Cf. Scheler 1973: 420. Scheler’s description of Sammlung, or the state of ‘ingatheredness’, is in some respects similar to what I have described here.

References Ayer, A. J. (1963). Concept of a Person and Other Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Beauvoir, S. de (1961). The Second Sex. Tr. H. M. Parshley. New York: Bantam. Place, U. T. (1956). ‘Is consciousness a brain process?’ British Journal of Psychology, February. Quinton, A. (1975). ‘The soul’. In Perry J., ed. Personal Identity, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Scheler, M. (1973). Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Trs. M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Williams, B. A. O. (1964). ‘Personal identity and individuation’. In D. F. Gustafson, ed. Essays in Philosophical Psychology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Zaner, R. M. (1971). The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body, second edition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Part III Continuing the Conversation


10 The Phenomenology of Clumsiness Katherine J. Morris

I want here to investigate the phenomenology of clumsiness:1 to explore a way of being embodied that to my knowledge has really only been touched on in passing by philosophers.2 I focus primarily on the phenomenology of the clumsy body in its various dimensions, although all aspects of being in the world are involved in clumsiness and indeed are implicit in descriptions of the clumsy body. Moreover, for reasons that will emerge, this phenomenology is grounded in the experience of the extremely clumsy. This exploration should have an intrinsic interest for those concerned with the phenomenology of the body and will enable a contextualization of those few remarks that have been made. At a deeper level, clumsiness provides a peculiarly good entry into certain philosophical issues surrounding the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ which is implicit in Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological descriptions of the body.

Methodology What are often called ‘phenomenologies’ aim at various levels of generality. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness apparently aims to be universal, to apply to any human being. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception at first sight appears to be aiming at a narrower scope by effectively qualifying ‘any human being’ with the word ‘normal’; presumably, however, such a qualification is implicit in BN as well.3 Other phenomenologies, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s ‘expérience vécu’ (lived experience)4 in The Second Sex (Book II) and Lewis R. Gordon’s descriptions of living a black body in an anti-black world (1995, esp. ch. 14), are manifestly less general.5 Such less general phenomenologies include phenomenologies of the ‘abnormal’. There are a fair number of descriptions of ‘abnormal’ individuals’ ways of being in the world; but these fall into different patterns. Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of ‘abnormal’ experience are a paradigm of one such pattern: he uses neuropathological and experimentally induced 161

162 Katherine J. Morris

experience primarily to highlight ‘normal’ experience by way of contrast. So the brain-injured Schneider’s inability to recognize a fountain pen, his having to figure out what it probably is by finding evidence, sheds light on ‘our’ (‘normal’ people’s) ability just to recognize the pen: it has a physiognomy for us but not for him (PP 131–2). A second pattern involves a reversal of the terms of the first: here the phenomenologists’ descriptions of ‘normal’ experience are used to shed light on the ‘abnormal’. Thus Matthew Philpott (1998) uses Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the intentional arc and ambiguity to characterize what is abnormal in dyslexic experience, and I elsewhere use Sartre’s notion of the lived body known by the other to identify what has become distorted in individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (Morris 2003).6 The phenomenology of clumsiness I sketch here is grounded in narratives from extremely clumsy people and from observations from therapists and educational psychologists working with such individuals.7 An added complication is that most of these individuals have received a diagnosis of ‘dyspraxia’.8 (I do not want to equate extreme clumsiness with dyspraxia, since to do so would seem to require my taking a stand on the validity of this diagnosis.9 I might suggest that there is a very rough extensional equivalence between extremely clumsy people and those who would receive a diagnosis of dyspraxia were they to seek one from a practitioner who was non-sceptical about this diagnosis. In the absence of phenomenologically illuminating narratives from undiagnosed extremely clumsy people, I have no option but to rely on narratives from those with that diagnosis, with all the philosophical dangers this carries.) I use Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the body to bring out the specific areas in which dyspraxic experience differs from the ‘normal’ experience characterized by these phenomenologists. Thus from one point of view, my enterprise here fits the second pattern outlined in the previous paragraph: I offer a ‘phenomenology of dyspraxia’ parallel to Philpott’s phenomenology of dyslexia. I do think that such a phenomenology has an intrinsic interest; I want, however, also to use it to raise some deeper philosophical questions. First, I suggest that these narratives of the extremely clumsy serve to remind us of the fact that clumsiness is part of everyone’s experience – from which perspective Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies are importantly incomplete. Thus this ‘phenomenology of dyspraxia’ fits the first pattern as well as the second: the abnormal here sheds new light on the normal.10 Secondly, I want to investigate the relation between extreme clumsiness and everyday clumsiness. Is there a continuum or a radical discontinuity? If we take it to be the first, then the very distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ is problematized. In fact, however, a case can be made for either; I will urge that this points to an inherent ambiguity in the phenomena and briefly indicate why this might itself be of interest.

The Phenomenology of Clumsiness

163

A phenomenological description of extreme clumsiness Clumsiness has been touched on by a few philosophers without being the principal focus. For instance, Merleau-Ponty briefly discusses apraxia (PP 126, 138 n. 2 and 139)11 – an older medical category which is a progenitor of the modern category of dyspraxia – in his chapter entitled ‘The spatiality of the body and motility’, where it plays the characteristic Merleau-Pontyan role of highlighting the ‘normal’ by way of the ‘abnormal’. Henri Bergson (not himself a phenomenologist) describes grace in Time and Free Will, where his interest is in the nature of the pleasure we gain from seeing graceful movement, and maladresse (maladroitness) in Laughter, where it contributes to his theory of the risible. Sartre picks up on Bergson in the context of his own treatment of the notion of the obscene, which he sees as belonging to ‘the genus of the ungraceful’ (BN 400); these descriptions apply to the bodyfor-others. The phenomenologist Drew Leder touches on ‘dysfunction in the motor sphere’ in passing as one example of the way in which the body-foritself, usually in the background, may ‘dys-appear’: ‘I forget my feet until the moment I stumble’ (1990: 85). These observations are insightful and I shall return to them in what follows, but each touches only on a narrow aspect of clumsiness. In this section I will sketch some of the outlines of a phenomenology of extreme clumsiness in connection in particular with the body: the clumsy individual’s own body, the clumsy body-for-others, the bodies of others as seen by the clumsy, and living a clumsy body for others. It goes without saying, at least for those conversant with phenomenology, that these dimensions of the body are internally related not only to each other but to the dimensions of spatiality and temporality.12 (Although I do call attention here and there to aspects of the life-space of the dyspraxic person, these further elaborations are largely left implicit.) For the purposes of this section, when I say ‘clumsy’, I mean ‘extremely clumsy’ (although in some cases the relevant experience may be familiar to the less clumsy); when I use the word ‘dyspraxic’ it is to be understood as meaning ‘extremely clumsy and having been diagnosed with dyspraxia’. (Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for ‘clumsiness’ and ‘dyspraxia’.) The clumsy individual’s own body I pick up here on various aspects of the clumsy person’s own body. It is to this dimension of the body that the contributions of Leder and Merleau-Ponty to the phenomenology of clumsiness belong. Although, as Sartre and other phenomenologists have observed, my own body is normally ‘invisible’ or in the background as the unperceived centre of the perceptive-cum-instrumental field, at times my own body, instead of ‘disappearing’, ‘dys-appears’: it suddenly moves from background to foreground (into ‘thematic focus’ in Leder’s terms, 1990: 84) because something has disrupted smooth functioning and demands our attention. Dyspraxic


people tend to ‘fall, trip and bump into things’,13 and this is just the sort of disruption of smooth functioning that can make the body or its parts ‘dys-appear’. One aspect of clumsy embodiment might, therefore, be the frequent dys-appearance of the body or its parts. This has an obvious correlate in life-space: the life-space of the clumsy person contains many more obstacles and hazards than that of the non-clumsy person; a slight unevenness in the pavement which would not figure on a non-clumsy person’s ‘hodological chart’ at all is a hazard for the clumsy. ‘If there’s one small brick in a large playground, he will fall over it’ (quoted in Eckersley 2004: 2). Indeed, among the obstacles and hazards in the life-space of people with dyspraxia may be their own bodies or body parts: they may literally ‘trip over their own feet’. Victoria Biggs (diagnosed with dyspraxia) ‘struggles’ with ironing because ‘my arms always seem to get in the way’ (2005: 176). Merleau-Ponty observes that I can ‘go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body’ (PP 143). Many dyspraxic people cannot do this; indeed Colley posits the ‘lack of awareness of body position in space and spatial relationship with objects’ which characterizes many dyspraxic individuals as a cause of their ‘bumping into objects and tripping over, spilling and dropping things’ (Colley 2006: 19; cf. Eckersley 2004: 2). In some cases, it may not simply be a lack of bodily awareness but almost a bodily misperception of spatial relations; thus Biggs describes a visit to a fairground: At one point we had to pass beneath a rocket ride. My sister trundled the pram beneath the spinning metal capsules without once looking up, but I stopped and stared in sickish fear . . . The rockets were so near the ground that they would surely smash into my head . . . Logic told me that those rockets were too high to hit me, yet I still couldn’t believe it (Biggs 2005: 27) ‘Objects are revealed to us’, says Sartre, ‘at the heart of a complex of instrumentality in which they occupy a determined place. This place is not defined by purely spatial coordinates but in relation to axes of practical reference’ (BN 321); these ‘axes’ – ‘up’/’down’, ‘nearer’/’further’, ‘left’/’right’, and so on – are centred on the body. For something to be further away is for it to be further out of the reach of my hands or gaze (PP 261); to be oriented in terms of ‘up’ and ‘down’ is for one’s body to be geared to the world so that ‘my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world’ (PP 250). Yet according to Eckersley, many dyspraxic individuals ‘don’t really understand concepts like “in”, “on”, “in front of”, “behind” and so on’ (2004: 17). Again, many dyspraxic people ‘have a poor sense of direction and can’t tell left from right’ (quoted Colley 2006: 135, cf. 74; cf. Biggs 2005: 181, 182).14 A correlate in life-space is the fact that clumsy people may frequently get disoriented or lost: ‘I was late for nearly every lesson


165

because I got lost on campus’ (Biggs 2005: 49). One of many reasons why clumsy children may be poor at team sports is that even if they manage to kick the ball, they are apt to lose sight of which end of the field is which and thus to kick it toward their own goal. One aspect of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘motor intentionality’ (PP 110) is ‘the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance’ (PP 144; cf. PP 94, BN 426). The clumsy body seldom experiences such a harmony between intention and performance.15 If asked to touch the nose with the hand while the eyes are closed, a dyspraxic child ‘will probably distract the examiner by coughing at the last minute or will touch his nose with the whole of his hand’ (Portwood 1996: 52). Clumsy people may be, as we say, ‘all thumbs’: dyspraxic children find it difficult to tie their own shoelaces and may need to wear trainers with Velcro fasteners (cf. Portwood 1996: 31).16 ‘I did not learn to . . . tie my shoelaces until I was twelve’ (quoted in Colley 2006: 133). ‘I struggle to button up a duvet cover’, says Biggs, and she has visions, once she goes to university, ‘of myself running out into the street and propositioning a surprised passer-by with a tin opener and a can of food!’ (Biggs 2005: 176). In these circumstances, the clumsy person’s body may appear as obstinate, perverse or even malevolent: ‘Do any of you ever feel like shrieking at your body, “For once in your life, just LISTEN TO ME!”?’ (Biggs 2005: 133; cf. Blijlevens 2005: 7, 92).17 ‘His right hand is capable of doing all his tasks, but his left hand tends to have a mind of its own’ (Blijlevens 2005: 90). It may even do ‘sneaky things, like a naughty child, without him knowing about it’ (Blijlevens 2005: 93), for instance, getting out two pairs of socks when the person is only after one. As a correlate of this aspect of clumsy embodiment, things may appear in the life-world as obstinate, perverse and malevolent: compasses may have ‘vampire-like tendencies’ (Biggs 2005: 52); kettles engage you in battle and sometimes ‘the kettle wins’ (Biggs 2005: 25). ‘Tom struggles with getting dressed . . . “Here are the dreaded socks . . . I thought socks would be easy but they have been fiendish” ’ (Blijlevens 2005: 57). An order to move normally has an immediate ‘motor significance’ (PP 143): it ‘communicates’ to us as a ‘mobile subject’ (PP 110).Yet it seems that even simple orders to move in a particular way may lack that immediate motor significance to clumsy bodies. What is at issue is not in general lack of intellectual understanding: the words simply fail to engage with the body as a mobile subject (cf. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of apraxia, PP 138 n. 2). Clumsy people may have difficulties in following apparently simple motor commands: gymnasts with dyspraxia sometimes had difficulties following instructions such as ‘walk along the beam and jump off at the end’ (Hessell 2006: 105).18 Again, the PE teacher says ‘ “When the music starts I want the girls to walk round the outside of the hall and the boys to jump on the spot . . . ” The music starts and Danny enthusiastically begins to move with a quick marching step in a clockwise manner’ (Portwood 1996: 30).


Merleau-Ponty stresses both the immediacy of ‘motor significance’ and the bodiliness of that significance: the acquisition of a habit or motor skill is the acquisition of bodily knowledge or understanding, where the emphasis is on the body (qua ‘mediator of a world’, PP 145) as opposed to the intellect. Knowledge of how to type, for example, is ‘knowledge in the hand’ (PP 144), not in the intellect. Yet it seems that many clumsy bodies are poor at acquiring bodily knowledge, so clumsy people may have to rely on their intellect. 19 Dyspraxic people may need to concentrate where ‘the rest of us’ can simply take things for granted. ‘When you’re perching on a high stool with no back or arms, you may be so busy trying to keep your balance that you can’t listen to the teacher’ (Biggs 2005: 59, cf. 94; cf. Eckersley 2004: 34); ‘he has to concentrate not only on what he is writing about but on every little line or curve of each letter he writes’ (Blijlevens 2005: 87, cf. 83; cf. Biggs 2005: 60; cf. 133). Loss of concentration can result in disaster: ‘my hands have a number of scars from when I’ve lost concentration and ironed myself instead of the thing I was supposed to be ironing’ (quoted in Biggs 2005: 180). We might even talk about ‘bodily stupidity’.20 Likewise, the bodies of stroke victims with adult-onset dyspraxia may forget what they once knew: ‘The simple task of opening a door becomes a puzzle to solve . . . his body no longer knows how to open a door. Previously, his hand would have automatically reached out for the handle. Now his hand does not know where to begin’ (Blijlevens 2005: 83): ‘we discover that our body has forgotten how to do something that was previously second nature’ (Blijlevens 2005: 82). If ‘normal’ consciousness is ‘in the first place not a matter of “I think” but of “I can” ’ (PP 137), clumsy consciousness is often a matter of ‘If I do not think, I cannot’. Blijlevens’s reference (in the previous paragraph) to ‘second nature’ is striking. Although she does not theorize this concept, it is tempting to link it to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which he describes as ‘second nature’ (1977: 79) and as ‘history turned into nature’ (1977: 78). In the clumsy, ‘history’, that is to say the individual’s repetition of a sequence of actions which we expect to become sedimented into a relatively enduring bodily disposition, takes a very long time to ‘turn into nature’, and may never get there. ‘[M]ost people when learning to touch type seem to reach a point where it comes naturally, but this did not happen with me’ (quoted in Colley 2006: 130); ‘nothing came naturally to me’ (quoted in Eckersley 2004: 55 and in Drew 2005: 95). ‘Dyspraxic children find it extremely difficult to execute tasks which involve co-ordination of arms and legs and whereas the majority of youngsters acquire naturally a level of ability in such activities, the dyspraxic child can do so only with practice’ (Portwood 1996: 98; cf. Eckersley 2004: 17). The motor skills of clumsy individuals often fail to ‘flow’ (Blijlevens 2006: 134); they lack a ‘ “motor” music’, a ‘kinetic melody’ (cf. Sacks 1990: 144), they are fragmented into tiny parts: ‘When I do something as seemingly


167

simple as putting the cap back on my fountain pen, I have to make a conscious effort (aim – slide – twist!)’ (Biggs 2005: 48). Conversely, in order to teach motor skills to dyspraxic youngsters, ‘each activity has to be broken down into its components and taught sequentially’ (Portwood 1996: 99, cf. 141; cf. Hessell 2006: 115–16): even a task as apparently straightforward as making a cup of tea can be broken down into a sequence of smaller tasks – filling the kettle and switching it on, finding a mug, putting a teabag in the mug. . . . All of which can be complicated and confusing for someone with dyspraxia, who may then miss out some vital part of the sequence like adding the teabag. (Eckersley 2004: 64) Rather than flowing, complex actions ‘stutter’. This lack of motor fluency may be seen, in part, as the first-person analogue of the lack of grace that often characterizes the clumsy body-for-others, to which we now turn. The clumsy body-for-others Dyspraxia is regularly characterized as a ‘hidden disability’ or ‘hidden handicap’ inasmuch as it is not immediately obvious just by looking (Kirby 1999: sub-title; Eckersley 2004: 48; Hessell 2006: 23; Drew 2005: 25; Biggs 2005 even refers to those with dyspraxia as ‘the hidden people’). Yet when clumsy people move or attempt to perform an action, others quickly recognize that there is something not quite right.21 This is the aspect of the clumsy bodyfor-others on which Sartre and Bergson focus. Yet there are other equally visible manifestations of clumsiness – for instance, clumsy individuals may look untidy – which have much to do with the way others see them. The body of a clumsy person in motion often has certain characteristic perceptible qualities. We talk of someone as simply looking ‘gawky’ or ‘uncoordinated’ when they walk or run; they lack ‘rhythm’. There are arguably a number of features which contribute to this impression. One is that clumsy people often engage in extraneous, non-functional ‘accessory’ movements; for example, when running, their hands may flap about uselessly, above waist level (Portwood 1996: 105; Colley 2006: 17); if asked to ‘sequence each finger against the thumb of the same hand’, the child will ‘mirror’ this movement in the opposite hand (Portwood 1996: 50; cf. 25). 22 Again, they often visibly perform actions inefficiently and expend unnecessary effort: Blijlevens includes a heartbreaking series of video stills of Peter trying to remove his sock (2005: 83–6): at the first attempt, he ‘tries to pull his sock off by the toe, while his heel is firmly on the ground’; he then ‘tries to use his right foot to pin the sock down while pulling his left one out of the sock’; eventually, he ‘attempts to push his fingers down the back of his foot in order to get the sock over his heel’; at last, success, and ‘he has a moment


to catch his breath’. And, quite simply, they seem to move in ‘unnatural’ ways: when they walk on their toes their ‘arms [often] move outwards and hands bend at the wrist away from the body’ (Portwood 1996: 48), when they jump they often hold the elbows ‘tightly into [the] waist, arms upwards and fists clenched’ (Portwood 1996: 52). Again, whereas non-clumsy people ‘naturally’ move their arms and legs in opposition (that is, when they stride forward with one leg, the opposite arm tends to go back), clumsy people’s arms tend to go forward together (Portwood 1996: 25); as one parent described this, ‘her arms seemed to mirror what her legs were doing’ (quoted in Eckersley 2004: 16). Sartre and Bergson bring out many of these features in their descriptions of the ungraceful. Bearing in mind that for Sartre the obscene is a species of the ungraceful, he notes that in one paradigm of the obscene – ‘certain involuntary waddlings of the rump’ – the rump ‘is revealed as an unjustifiable facticity. . . . It is isolated in the body for which the present meaning is walking’ (BN 401). In other words, the sheer fleshiness of the body is normally entirely absorbed, from the other’s point of view, by the meaningfulnessin-situation of his movements; but in the ungraceful, some elements of his body or its movements are ‘unjustified’ by that situation: hence the clumsy person’s extraneous ‘accessory’ movements. For Bergson, the notion of grace suggests as a minimum ‘a certain ease, a certain facility in the outward movements’ (Bergson 1910: 11); thus the ungraceful person seems to expend far more effort than the task calls for. But more than that: we can, Bergson says, somehow ‘read’ graceful movements: the end is implicit in the beginning; by contrast, ‘If jerky movements are wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them is self-sufficient and does not announce those which are to follow’ (Bergson 1910: 13).23 This perhaps illuminates the ‘unnaturalness’ we find in much clumsy movement. But this is only one aspect of the clumsy body for others. It is noteworthy that we speak of ‘social clumsiness’ as well as physical clumsiness. Indeed, many terms for human beings and actions which are socially clumsy derive from physical clumsiness: we speak of ‘committing a faux pas’ (that is, a ‘false step’), or ‘putting one’s foot in one’s mouth’; ‘lacking the social graces’; being ‘gauche’ or ‘maladroit’ (reflecting the myth that left-handed – or ‘cackhanded’ – people are clumsy by contrast with their ‘adroit’ or ‘dextrous’ colleagues). Even ‘tactless’ indicates that the person lacks ‘the touch’ or ‘a certain touch’ in managing in social situations. It would be a mistake to read too much into this; yet clumsy people are very often socially awkward or even isolated. There are arguably a number of reasons for this, which demonstrate that the clumsy body-for-others may have more visible features than Sartre and Bergson recognize. First, the manifestations of physical clumsiness: clumsy people may fail to button their shirt properly or spill the soup in their neighbour’s lap or have dirt under their fingernails. ‘It is not uncommon for me to fail to dress


169

properly and leave zips and buttons undone or misaligned’ (quoted in Drew 2005: 85). Hence, Biggs offers other individuals with dyspraxia a series of tips on dressing, health and hygiene, personal appearance (2005: 122–30) and eating (2005: 32), for instance: ‘Drink from a long, flexible straw if you have a tendency to miss your mouth when you drink’ (see also Colley 2006: ch. 5; Drew 2005: 98–100). Thus the clumsy body-for-others is often untidy, chaotic and a little unhygienic (and hence to a degree socially unacceptable).24 Secondly, the clumsy individual’s expressive capacities – facial expressions, gestures, ‘body language’ – don’t come ‘naturally’. They may need to be taught explicitly that you should ‘make noises like, “Hmm,” and nod your head to show that you’re interested in a conversation’ (Biggs 2005: 94). There is often a ‘lack of emotional/facial expression’ (Drew 2005: 85); many dyspraxic individuals make ‘poor eye contact’ (Drew 2005: 85; cf. Colley 2006: 50, Biggs 2005: 99), which clearly makes others uneasy: ‘I wasn’t aware that I was doing anything wrong until I overheard a teacher saying, “I’m uncomfortable talking to Vicky, she won’t look you in the eye” ’ (Biggs 2005: 85). Thus the clumsy body for others will often seem indefinably odd: what Biggs (2005: 83) calls ‘the nameless strangeness’. Thirdly, many dyspraxic people have difficulties with ‘following unwritten social rules’ (Drew 2005: 73) which are ‘second nature’ to ‘normal’ people; they ‘are poor at judging how to behave in the company of other people’ (Eckersley 2004: 17). In speaking, register is often a problem: ‘my manner of speech used to provoke angry outbursts from classmates, who mistakenly thought that I was choosing ostentatious words just to show off’ (Biggs 2005: 86). They may have a similar difficulty with ‘register’ in dressing, wearing clothes that are too formal or too casual for the occasion. Not being attuned to the rules of fashion, adolescents with dyspraxia may appear in ‘the sorts of clothes that my mother wears’. Again, ‘How are you?’ may provoke a detailed account of the dyspraxic individual’s recent illnesses (Colley 2006: 49–50). ‘One of my roommates once asked me, “Is my eye makeup OK?” and I said, “No, you look like a panda”. I thought she wanted to know how she looked before she left the room. Judging by what happened next, apparently not!’ (Biggs 2005: 85).25 Dyspraxic people may fail to observe the unwritten rules about ‘turn-taking’ in games and in conversation, and may interrupt frequently or ‘share information that is inappropriately intimate’ (Drew 2005: 85). Conversation with a person who has dyspraxia tends to jump from subject to subject. We often go off on a tangent . . . We tend not to listen to the speaker and constantly interrupt. Sometimes we wait for the other speaker to draw breath and then blurt out ideas we have not thought through. (Colley 2006: 49)


Thus Biggs offers a series of ‘pointers for politeness’: for instance, ‘If you get hold of a fact that you find interesting (“The toucan’s beak is longer than its body!”) . . . don’t rush around telling everyone’ (2005: 91). Dyspraxic people are often poor at respecting ‘social distance’ (Drew 2005: 73) or, as it is sometimes put, ‘judging personal space’ (cf. Colley 2006: 52-3, Drew 2005: 85); ‘When I’m talking to people I either stand several feet away from them, as if they have a contagious disease, or I end up treading on their toes’ (Biggs 2005: 87). ‘Misjudging’ this can cause embarrassment – ‘If you stand too close to a member of the opposite sex, everyone decides that you fancy them, and if you stand too close to a member of your own sex, people call you gay’ (Biggs 2005: 92) – and even real trouble: ‘I was once accused of sexual harassment. . . . A friend did tell me that I have a tendency to stand too close to people, which feels like invading their personal space’ (Eckersley 2004: 57). In short, sufferers are often unaware of the impact of their own behaviour and of the implications of what others are saying and doing. Add in difficulties with coordination and voice control, and the whole area of communication and building and sustaining relationships with others becomes fraught. (Colley 2006: 48) Thus the clumsy body can appear intrusive, inappropriate and insensitive (and dyspraxic people may appear self-centred and inconsiderate: cf. Colley 2006: 49). The other’s body for the clumsy These last points may make it seem less surprising to learn that dyspraxia is often associated with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, sometimes called ‘high-functioning autism’ (Eckersley 2004: 8),26 conditions in which the most salient manifestation is a kind of blindness to others.27 Even those diagnosed with dyspraxia who have not been co-diagnosed with autism or Asperger’s may have difficulty ‘reading’ other people’s facial expressions, as well as with ‘using’ these expressive capacities themselves:28 they ‘may be unable to work out from someone’s facial expression whether she is angry, sad, or frustrated’ (Eckersley 2004: 2; cf. Colley 2006: 53). ‘I am not good at translating faces,’ says Biggs (2005: 20, cf. 42, 87). More generally, people with dyspraxia may find difficulty with understanding (as well as with ‘using’) ‘body-language’ (Drew 2005: 64, 73); thus Biggs (2005: 94–5; cf. Colley 2006: 52–3), in addition to her other helpful tips, offers a guide to body language which is aimed at ‘reading’ (as well as at ‘using’) such ‘non-verbal communication’: she includes a table of gestures, together with their ‘translations’; for instance, ‘Shaking a finger’ means ‘ “I’m warning you” or “you’ve done something I don’t approve of” ’, and ‘Comfortably


171

slouching in a chair or against a wall’ means ‘ “I’m relaxing” or sometimes “I’m bored” ’. Other’s bodies and their expressive capacities are thus often a puzzle for clumsy people, in somewhat the way that they are for individuals with Asperger’s syndrome. (The title of the chapter in which Biggs (2005) gives her ‘translations’ of body language and ‘pointers for politeness’ is ‘Crossing the chasm’.) Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous living individual with Asperger’s, thinks of herself as ‘an anthropologist on Mars’ in her efforts to understand others.29 She describes herself as having built up a library of mental ‘videotapes’ ‘of how people behaved in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again and learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict how people in similar circumstances might act’ (Sacks 1995: 260). Grandin has to ‘ “compute” others’ intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit, what for the rest of us is second nature’ (1995: 270). Other children participated in ‘an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that she [as a child] sometimes wondered if they were all telepathic’. She can now ‘infer’ social signals, ‘but she cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive the many-levelled kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it’ (1995: 272). Bergson uses the striking expression ‘physical sympathy’ to characterize ‘the feeling of grace’: in dance, ‘when the graceful movements submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by music . . . the regularity of the rhythm establishes a kind of communication between him and us’ (1910: 12). He even suggests that there is an ‘affinity’ between physical sympathy and moral sympathy (1910: 13).30 We might connect these notions with the ‘immediate intersubjective significance’ of which Merleau-Ponty speaks here: even for a 15-month-old baby, my pretend biting ‘has immediately . . . an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its own body’ (PP 352). Susie Orbach’s term ‘attunement’ (2009: 59–60) captures something of the same idea. This sympathy, immediate intersubjective significance or attunement is mutual. We have already seen something like a lack of physical sympathy or attunement when non-clumsy others witness clumsy people in movement, and we shall see what might be termed a lack of moral sympathy. What these observations about the body of the other for the clumsy suggest is that the lack too is mutual.31 Living a clumsy body for others Thus far we have described how clumsy people look to others and how others look to clumsy people. Yet others often respond to clumsiness in characteristic ways. Bergson stresses the fact that clumsiness provokes laughter. One of his paradigms of the risible is the man who stumbles and falls while running along the street; what raises a laugh ‘is not his sudden change


of attitude . . . but rather the involuntary element in this change . . . Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle.’ Instead, as a result ‘of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else’ (1911: 9). Bergson (with, it has to be said, a remarkable insensitivity toward the target of the laughter, though his observations must be seen in their context) argues that there is something intrinsic to clumsiness that provokes laughter;32 although he does not use this phrase, what provokes laughter is what we earlier called bodily stupidity. The issue for this section is what it is like to be aware of being seen in this way. The terms ‘shame’ and ‘fear’ frequently figure (Drew 2005: 82–4), which will have powerful echoes for those familiar with Sartre’s analysis of being looked at by others (BN III.1). The fear experienced by clumsy people includes not simply fear of failure (which may be ‘paralysing’), ridicule (all too often justified) and rejection (likewise), but ‘fear of being found out’ (Drew 2005: 83). ‘Many will have known all their life that something was “different about them” ’ (Drew 2005: 26). People with dyspraxia are frequently the target of bullying (Eckersley 2004: 33–4; Biggs 2005 includes a whole chapter on bullying). And many descriptions of the lived experience of being seen as clumsy strikingly use the word ‘stigma’: dyspraxic people are ‘stigmatized as clumsy, lazy, stupid or just a bit strange’ (Eckersley 2004: 45). The term ‘stigma’, as used in particular by sociologists and anthropologists, carries with it the idea of being an outsider – an outcast, an ‘Other’, in Sartrean/Beauvoirian terms, or an ‘alien’, with all the ambiguities of this term – and, for the one stigmatized, a concomitant ‘conscious[ness] of a precarious identity’ (Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997: 30). Littlewood and Lipsedge (1997: 225–6) describe various strategies used by stigmatized groups for ‘minimising the danger to our own integrity’. Some of these ‘collude with the views of those who regard us as defective’; these strategies might include disguising ourselves (for instance, if I am black and that quality is stigmatized, I may use skin lightening cream), or using our stigmatized quality to our advantage (for instance, making myself into a ‘mascot’ so as to be tolerated: ‘our cripple’). If we wish not to collude with those views, we may ‘accept the stereotyped view of ourselves but give it a desirable value’; we may even ‘gather around us other disadvantaged individuals who share our beliefs’ (for instance, through ‘redefinition’: ‘ “queers” become “gays”, black becomes beautiful, and psychosis becomes rebellion’, Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997: 31).33 Individuals with dyspraxia may well feel themselves outsiders – ‘aliens’ – and, significantly, some may even embrace that term; consider the title of a section in Biggs 2005: 87f.: ‘Meet the Martian’. And every one of the strategies outlined by Littlewood and Lipsedge is visible in the dyspraxia literature. Those who are afraid of ‘being found out’ ‘develop coping strategies to hide their difficulties . . . adults who have trouble understanding humour may


173

pretend to laugh at a joke even though they don’t understand it’ (Drew 2005: 83). Again, Vicky Biggs’ term ‘the hidden people’ – as if those with dyspraxia are a race of Brownies or Borrowers moving unnoticed among the ‘normals’ – carries something of the idea of a ‘mascot’; see also this exchange between Vicky and her roommates: ‘ “We’re used to Milly’s stresses . . . ” “. . . And we’ve got used to Marie hogging the mirror . . . ” “. . . and Vicky’s huge mess . . . ” ’ (Biggs 2005: 42). The dominant theme in much dyspraxia literature, however, is the revaluing of dyspraxia (Littlewood and Lipsedge’s ‘non-collusive’ strategy). The term ‘disability’ itself is often understood on the so-called social model of disability: ‘Disability is not something individuals have. What individuals have are impairments . . . Disability is the process which happens when one group of people create barriers by designing a world only for their way of living’ (quoted in Hessell 2006: 13; cf. Eckersley 2004: 87). A number of groups of people with dyspraxia and related diagnoses have been created, for example the Dyspraxia Foundation, the Dyscovery Centre and DANDA (the Developmental Adult Neuro-Diversity Association), as well as many online blogs, forums and discussion groups,34 which offer practical help and advice for getting on in this disabling world. These groups will ‘focus on the positives’: for example, they will say that people with dyspraxia are ‘creative problem-solvers’, have ‘outgoing personalities’ and are ‘persistent’ (Drew 2005: 23), and suggest ways of revaluing weaknesses as strengths: for instance, ‘slow’ may be re-cast as ‘methodical’, or ‘disorganized thinking’ as ‘having a creative approach’ (Drew 2005: 22). There is also a celebration of ‘difference’: ‘When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free’ (Charles Evans Hughes, quoted in Biggs 2005: 167). Yet there is an important ambiguity in the idea of ‘celebrating difference’, one that has a direct bearing on the philosophical conclusions we hope to draw. It could either be read as saying that there are numerous discrete ways of being in the world and all are equally valid, or as asserting that there are no sharp boundaries between various ways of being in the world and we should embrace the whole spectrum. The non-collusive strategy identified by Littlewood and Lipsedge manifestly rests on the first way of understanding this: it takes it for granted that human beings fall into categories like ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ or ‘black’ and ‘white’, but simply seeks to revalue members of the formerly stigmatized category. Similarly, much of the dyspraxia literature seems to take it for granted that the categories of ‘dyspraxic’ and what they sometimes call ‘regular’ are discrete: hence the title of Biggs’ (2005) final chapter, ‘Lying diagonally in a parallel universe’, Grant’s (2005) title That’s the Way I Think, and so on. But there surely is, in principle, another non-collusive way of responding to stigmatization, one which would stress the lack of sharp boundaries between dyspraxic people and ‘regulars’. The temptation is to say that one strategy or the other is ‘better’, meaning not ‘more likely to succeed’, but ‘more solidly grounded in


the truth’.35 With this, we begin to glimpse some of the philosophical issues which address in the final section.

Some philosophical issues and reflections I end by raising two somewhat interrelated philosophical issues and reflecting on their implications. Using the abnormal to shed light on the normal Most of us who read through the dyspraxia narratives will experience, at least here and there, a sense of identification. Although we can agree that the authors of these narratives may need various kinds of help in negotiating the physical and social worlds,36 perhaps more help than ‘we’ usually need most of the time, we none the less recognize something of ourselves – at least at times, or in phases of our lives – in their descriptions. Although not all human beings ‘are clumsy’, every human being has been through a phase of ‘being clumsy’ for a period of time – during adolescence, while adjusting to a newly elongated or burgeoning body (cf. Leder 1990: 85); in the course of acquiring or improving a motor skill such as driving a car or playing tennis (cf. Shusterman 2005: 166f.); or simply while tired or ill or preoccupied. Indeed, we might argue, the very idea of a body which has never been clumsy or is never clumsy is an impossibility, an ‘imaginary’ body: this would be a body which has never grown or changed, which does not acquire skills but simply has them, which does not need to adapt to tools but is always already adapted to them, and which is never tired, ill or simply inattentive (to the world or to other people). Yet Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies present the ‘normal’ body in something approaching this idealized way; they thus screen out universal aspects of human embodiment. (How straightforward it would be to modify them so as to accommodate these aspects is another question.) Thus a phenomenology of the abnormal (extreme clumsiness) can be used to highlight features of the normal (everyday clumsiness) which these phenomenologies of the normal have omitted. The relation between extreme clumsiness and everyday clumsiness We noted earlier that there seemed to be two possible ‘non-collusive’ antistigma strategies, one a kind of ‘separate but equal’ approach, the other aimed at blurring the line between the stigmatized and unstigmatized groups. Thus Jamie Hill, a friend of Vicky Biggs who claims not to be dyspraxic and who wrote the introduction to Biggs 2005, says, Vicky has in the past told me that her very severe dyspraxia affects her ability to judge the depths of swimming pools, tie her shoelaces or, when trying to drive, to keep the car in the centre of the road. This worries me,


175

as I – and in two of the cases, most of the human race – struggle with these very same things! (Biggs 2005: 9) And Biggs resists this: ‘I definitely (and vociferously!) disagree with his belief that my problems are shared by most of the population’ (Biggs 2005: 9). Consider first Hill’s ‘blurring the line’ approach. There is surely a case to be made for saying that there are no sharp boundaries. After all, there are degrees of ‘being clumsy’; and although I have characterized dyspraxia as implying ‘extreme clumsiness’, there are also degrees of dyspraxia (from mild through moderate to severe). A point that Hessell makes repeatedly is that her dyspraxic gymnasts did not stand out from the group of boys (a group which included non-dyspraxic boys and a range of ages and abilities): ‘I was surprised at how much variation from the “norm” was the norm in my group’ (2006: 112). One coach commented: ‘I didn’t have anybody ask me if they were different . . . I don’t think anyone would have noticed’ (quoted in Hessell 2006: 126). If we were to accept that there is a continuum between everyday clumsiness and the sort of clumsiness exhibited in severe dyspraxia, then the very distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ is problematized. This in turn might be argued to raise questions about the very idea of phenomenologies (like those of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) which are aiming in some sense to describe the essence of human reality, since there is a normativity built into the concept of essence. We might indeed have arrived at this conclusion by a different route: not by stressing continuity between people diagnosed with dyspraxia and ‘regulars’ but by stressing diversity within those who are diagnosed with dyspraxia. (While I have attempted not to homogenize these people, nor have I stressed differences.) Something like this philosophical strategy is pursued by Minae Inahara (2009a; see also 2009b), who uses an analogy with Luce Irigaray’s (1985) celebrated analysis of sexual difference to analyse the ‘able-bodied’/’disabled’ dichotomy. As long as disabled embodiment is defined simply as lacking what able bodies allegedly possess, she argues, disabled bodies will always be ‘other’, ‘defined as what the ablebodied is not’, hence defined as lacking or defective (2009a: 52). Her strategy is to focus on differences, fluidities, and multiplicities within the supposedly unitary category of ‘disabled bodies’, thereby disturbing the apparent clarity and fixity of the able body. However, a case can equally be made to support Biggs’ view that people with dyspraxia constitute a discrete category. If we were to pick out the key themes of embodiment à la Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, they might include ‘transparency’, ‘immediacy’, ‘harmony’, ‘naturalness’, ‘inhabiting’, ‘magic’, ‘immediacy’, ‘telepathy’, ‘attunement’ and ‘fluency’. The key themes for clumsy embodiment are markedly different: they might include ‘struggle’, ‘difficulty’, ‘frustration’, ‘impossibility’, ‘unnaturalness’, ‘alienation’ and


‘chaos’. ‘How do you begin to express the pain and frustration of a lifetime striving and struggling to achieve an impossibility: to carry out what are normal, everyday tasks to the majority of people on this planet?’ (quoted in Colley 2006: 127).37 ‘From beginning to end, my life has been one long struggle’ (quoted in Drew 2005: 21). For the ‘regulars’, moments and stages of clumsiness are transitory, against a taken-for-granted background of attunement to the world, others and one’s own body; for individuals with severe dyspraxia, there is no such presupposed background. Although it may be tempting to say that the only difference is one of degree – for example, how often one trips or drops things, or how difficult one finds it to acquire a new motor skill or attune to others’ expressions – it may be argued that we have here what Wittgenstein calls a ‘transition “from quantity to quality” ’(PI §284). How can this disagreement be resolved? Can either Hill or Biggs be shown to be right? I submit that nothing would count as showing this: that there is an inherent ambiguity in the phenomena, and one from which phenomenologists – of all people – ought not to shy away.38 This is the moment to call attention to the fact that many of the authors of the dyspraxia narratives are activists who have an investment in seeing themselves as having a ‘condition’ which appears to make sense of the life difficulties they encounter, and hence an investment in seeing themselves as in a category separate from the ‘normals’; it is not out of the question that they subtly exaggerate their differences from the ‘normals’ so as to effect this separation, or even that the diagnosis of dyspraxia subtly alters their experience. A diagnosis of dyspraxia can be a life-changing, positive experience: ‘It helped take away a sense of shame I’d been living with for all these years’ (quoted in Drew 2005: 26; cf. Colley 2006: 132).39 They may have felt ‘different’ or ‘freakish’ or ‘weird’, and now can say, ‘Hello, I’m not a freak! I am dyspraxic!’ (Biggs 2005: 19). The diagnosis reassures the individual ‘that I had a genuine difficulty and wasn’t just “weird” ’ (Biggs 2005: 141). ‘When I was diagnosed with dyspraxia I was actually happy. I recognized it as the answer to that question I had pondered about for so long – why I was such an outcast’ (quoted in Biggs 2005: 36; cf. 137).40 Some, however, note that a diagnosis of dyspraxia is a double-edged sword; it may ‘be used as an excuse’ (Drew 2005: 25). This observation will sound alarm bells with those of us familiar with Sartre’s notion of bad faith. In the case of everyday clumsiness, there is an attribution of responsibility, and the person who has been clumsy is meant to accept this: ‘That was stupid of me’, or ‘I should have seen it there’ or ‘I guess I wasn’t paying attention’ or ‘I wasn’t trying hard enough’. It is no accident that people who have been diagnosed with dyspraxia are forever fending off precisely these accusations: of stupidity, carelessness, inattention and laziness. Is this or is this not bad faith on their part? I suggest that the answer is that it is ambiguous, precisely because it is ambiguous whether dyspraxia is or is not continuous with


177

everyday clumsiness.41 If those with dyspraxia really do constitute a separate category, then their dyspraxia absolves them of much of their responsibility; otherwise it does not. I want to end by suggesting that this ambiguity is one into the experience of which we as phenomenologists ought to enter. We need imaginatively to put ourselves in the position of these extremely clumsy individuals, to ask ourselves whether we would seek a diagnosis of dyspraxia, and to imagine how we would respond if we were told that the diagnosis had been confirmed. Should we accept it or not? It seems to me that unless we recognize this as a lived dilemma, we have missed the greatest phenomenological adventure of all.42 Finally, where does this leave Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the body? I will simply say this: first, that there is a philosophical role for idealized imaginaries and that the fluent, invisible, magical and telepathic body they described continues to be invaluable in resisting the threat of scientism and intellectualism in all its forms; and secondly, that it was they who first taught us about multiplicity and ambiguity: if there proves to be more than they themselves recognized, I have no doubt that they would embrace it.

Notes 1. The word ‘clumsy’ may be deemed offensive or even politically incorrect; at the least, ‘ “[c]lumsy” is a miserable label to live with’ (preface to Portwood 1996). I have chosen to stick with it for want of a less problematic option; English contains an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for the varieties of clumsiness which are at least as insulting. ‘Dyspraxic’ (see below) carries a different set of problems. 2. A much earlier version of this was presented at the University of Sussex in 1998. I am grateful to the participants for their comments on that occasion, and to Betsy Behnke, Tim Horder, Minae Inahara, Michael Gillan Peckitt and Richard Shusterman for their comments on more recent drafts. 3. It need not be seen as a qualification if we bear in mind that in some sense of this word, phenomenology has always aimed at revealing essences. Essences were always normative in the sense that they never excluded the existence of empirical deviations from the essence, but classified them, precisely, as deviations or privations. (‘Man is a rational animal’ did not exclude the existence of irrational human beings; but it characterized such human beings as deprived of reason.) 4. H. M. Parshley, unhelpfully, translates the title of Book II as ‘Woman’s Life Today’. 5. To put it otherwise, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty take themselves to be doing ontology, and would see these less general ‘phenomenologies’ as ontic (cf. Mui in this volume). If the arguments in this essay carry any weight, this distinction itself may be problematized. 6. A variant on this approach argues that the way to talk phenomenologically about ‘abnormal’ experience is to focus not on where it is different from normal experience, but where it is similar: thus the person with dyslexia ‘may have trouble in making sense of abstract tasks, but what is interesting is not where he fails, but how he still succeeds in restoring coherence and repairing breakdowns’


7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

(Widdershoven 1998: 30; cf. Sacks 1985). I am inclined to think that the narrative voices on which I rely for the phenomenology of extreme clumsiness below are sufficiently positive and assertive that their ways of ‘restoring coherence and repairing breakdowns’ are clearly audible. I draw on first-person narratives by individuals diagnosed with dyspraxia (see note 8) such as Biggs (2005) and ‘dyspraxia activist’ Colley (2006); on quotations from individuals with dyspraxia given by psychologists such as Grant (2005), and on descriptions and quotations offered by educational psychologists such as Portwood (1996), occupational therapists such as Drew (2005) and trainee occupational therapists such as Hessell (2006). (Eckersley 2004 is a freelance writer on health topics with a good deal of interview-based material.) All of these studies are concerned with ‘developmental’ dyspraxia. I make use in addition of another unpublished masters theses by a trainee occupational therapist (Blijlevens 2005) which deals with adult-onset (mostly post-stroke) dyspraxia. I hesitated to use it since there are obvious differences between developmental and adult-onset dyspraxia – from the phenomenological perspective, most notably the fact that individuals with the latter have a ‘normal’ way of being-in-the-world with which to contrast their new way – but her study is explicitly informed by phenomenology (mainly Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and contains such a rich array of relevant material that I have allowed myself to use it where the experiences of her subjects appear to parallel that of individuals with developmental dyspraxia. ‘Dyspraxia’ is a technical term referring to an (alleged) clinical entity (or set of entities). Under the name ‘developmental coordination disorder’ or DCD, it appears in the fourth edition of the standard psychiatric manual (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM IV), although dyspraxia and DCD are sometimes distinguished, with dyspraxia indicating a specific difficulty with motor planning (see Drew 2005: 2). It appears in the tenth edition of the International Categorization of Diseases, or ICD-10 (used by the World Health Organization), as ‘specific developmental disorder of motor function’, where it is classified as a ‘disorder of psychological development’ under the larger category ‘mental and behavioural disorders’. Other authoritative textbooks classify it as neurological. An older term for ‘developmental dyspraxia’ is ‘clumsy child syndrome’ (see ICD-10); another is ‘congenital maladroitness’ (Drew 2005: 2). I consistently use ‘dyspraxia’ in the text to avoid confusion. However, the complex history of its nomenclature, diagnostic criteria and classification (see Drew 2005: ch. 1) may give aid and comfort to the sceptics. Sceptical practitioners and certain sectors of the general public are apt to see ‘dyspraxia’ as nothing more than a fashionable label for clumsiness, ‘as if it carries the same kind of prestige as Miss Sixty or Fcuk’ (Biggs 2005: 17). Although there are highly important issues here, I cannot here enter into the literature from the philosophy of psychiatry on psychiatric classification and labelling, or into the sociological literature around medicalization. This point has been made by Shusterman (2005). His immediate concern here is to restore to their proper place explicit somatic sensations (for which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology leaves no place); his wider aim is to point up the suboptimal bodily functioning even of ‘normal’ people with a view to improving it. According to the translator’s note on PP 126, apraxia is ‘(i) A disorder of voluntary movement, consisting in a more or less complete incapacity to execute purposeful


12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

179

movements, notwithstanding the preservation of muscular power, sensibility, and co-ordination in general. (ii) A psychomotor defect in which one is unable to apply to its proper use an object which one is nevertheless able to name and the uses of which one is able to describe.’ Thus there is a phenomenological justification for Grant’s leading idea that being dyspraxic ‘should be considered as a lifestyle’ (Grant 2005: 2). It is arguably nonaccidental that people with dyspraxia often have difficulties not only with ‘gross’ and ‘fine’ motor coordination, but with speech and language; eye movements; perception; and learning, thought and memory, with ‘emotional and behavioural reactions’ among the ‘secondary signs’ (Colley 2006: 16–20). Colley (2006: 17) cites these as one symptom of developmental dyspraxia; ICD10 includes ‘signs of impaired . . . gross motor coordination’ in its definition of developmental dyspraxia. Colley (2006: 18) cites ‘poorly established hand dominance’ as an indicator of developmental dyspraxia, likewise ‘difficulty in distinguishing left from right’ (2006: 19). Eckersley suggests that dyspraxic children ‘may use the right hand to complete a task on the right side of the body and the left hand to do so on the left side’ (2004: 28). Cf. also Philpott 1998: 10. Colley (2006: 17) cites ‘lack of manual dexterity’ and ‘poor manipulative skills’ as among the symptoms of developmental dyspraxia; ICD-10 refers to ‘signs of impaired fine . . . motor coordination’. ‘We know what we have to do but our bodies don’t speak the same language as our brains and the translator is drunk’ (Biggs 2005: 53). Hessell adds the interesting speculation ‘that the subtle aspects, such as which direction to walk along the beam, to pause if someone is going more slowly in front of you, or even to do the activity promptly[,] were missed’ (Hessell 2006: 105). This suggests that a good deal of tacit social knowledge is lacking in her subjects. The acquisition of complex motor skills also takes longer than ‘normal’ for individuals with dyspraxia: ‘It took me years to learn to cycle’ (Biggs 2005: 183). ‘It took me forever to learn how to drive a car. I lost count of the number of lessons, but it took six tests’ (quoted in Colley 2006: 73). This is all too often confused with stupidity, as clumsy people are aware: ‘Can’t you even write your own name yet, thicko?’ (Biggs 2005: 111; cf. ‘Lament of a dyspraxic’, Drew 2005: 68). Indeed, such people may be tempted to apply this word to themselves: ‘you get very wild with yourself. You get ‘how stupid can you be?’ sort of feeling’ (quoted in Blijlevens 2005: 92). ‘Individuals with DCD [dyspraxia] display a qualitative difference in movement which differentiates them from those of the same age without the disability’ (from the London, Ontario International Consensus Statement, quoted in Drew 2005: 1). Those with developmental dyspraxia exhibit ‘marked neurodevelopmental immaturities such as choreiform movements of unsupported limbs [that is, resembling the movements of sufferers of Huntingdon’s or other choreas] and mirror movements [that is, a tendency for one limb involuntarily to mirror what the other is doing]’ (ICD-10). So part of the pleasure we take in witnessing or performing graceful movements is ‘the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present’ (Bergson 1910: 12).

180 Katherine J. Morris 24. Moreover, to the extent that being clean, tidy and well made up are part of hegemonic femininity in many Western societies, the dyspraxic female body for others will appear unfeminine. In addition, dyspraxic children tend to be considered to be undesirable team members (‘When we played class sports I would always be the last one picked and the side that ended up with me always moaned’, quoted in Biggs 2005: 52, cf. Hessell 2006: 117, Eckersley 2004: 1). Given ‘cultural beliefs regarding physical skilfulness’ according to which sport is ‘the site for the construction and display of hegemonic masculinity at school’ (quoted in Hessell 2006: 25; this is as true for many other societies as it is for New Zealand where Hessell conducted her study), boys in particular may suffer socially through clumsiness (cf. Eckersley 2004: 41–2). 25. More generally, many people with dyspraxia also fail to be attuned to aspects of language other than the straightforwardly assertoric. They have difficulty understanding ‘jokes, idiom, sarcasm or metaphor’ (Drew 2005: 64, 73; cf. Colley 2006: 49–50). ‘Tell the [dyspraxic] pupil to pull her socks up and she may do just that!’ (Biggs 2005: 68; on jokes, see 87–8). 26. That is, there is frequent ‘co-morbidity’; others take the absence of autism or Asperger’s syndrome to be included in differential diagnoses of dyspraxia (see Drew 2005: 9); sometimes it is classified as an autistic spectrum disorder (see Biggs 2005: 14). It is also often associated with dyslexia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but I want to focus here on autism and Asperger’s syndrome because of their close connection to difficulties with understanding others. 27. Many psychologists speak of autistic individuals as ‘lacking a theory of mind’; phenomenologists will, of course, reject this intellectualist construction. 28. Many of those with dyspraxia, according to Biggs (2005: 50), also have difficulty in recognizing faces. 29. Oliver Sacks borrowed this phrase for the title and title essay of his 1995 book. 30. This is his ultimate explanation of why grace brings pleasure to the observer. 31. In Blijlevens’s dissertation, the only point that emerges in her sections on the Other (69–78 and 138–9) are her subjects’ changed relationships to others on whom they are now dependent. It is not out of the question that this is an important area of difference between developmental and adult-onset dyspraxia. 32. Why exactly does clumsiness make us laugh? According to Bergson, society is ‘suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body’ (1911: 19); laughter is a ‘social gesture’ which, through inspiring fear, aims at the social control of such ‘eccentricities’ (1911: 20). 33. The parallels between this account (by an anthropologist and a psychiatrist) and Sartre’s discussion of the Jew (Sartre 1946) hardly needs pointing up. See also Gordon in this volume. 34. www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk, www.dyscovery.co.uk, www.danda.org.uk. A well-known blog (plus forum) is www.matts-hideout.co.uk; http://health.groups. yahoo.com/group/Dyspraxia/ is one of many online discussion groups. 35. From a purely ‘strategic’ perspective, what she and others are attempting to do is to effect a separation between a particular statistical sense of ‘normal’, meaning roughly the way of being in the world of the majority or the dominant group, and a ‘normative’ sense, which makes that majority or dominant way of being in the world more positively valued. Such a separation may be more difficult than they might think (arguably for Foucauldian reasons; cf. Foucault 1979).


181

36. A number of the books on which I rely here are primarily aimed at practical assistance for people with dyspraxia: from tips on organization, through specialist equipment, treatments, and therapies, to obtaining disability benefits. 37. Thus the central chapters (4, 5 and 6) in Blijlevens 2005 are entitled respectively ‘Struggling with their world’, ‘The being of struggle’, and ‘Overcoming the struggle’. 38. Annemarie Mol (1998), in part as a response to Canguilhem’s (1966) distinction between the norms of the clinic and the norms of the laboratory, explores something like this ambiguity in the very different context of diabetes, and (in Mol 2002) in connection with atherosclerosis, and from the very different theoretical perspective of science and technology studies. 39. Moreover, ‘diagnosis is an important step towards obtaining practical help with everyday living’ or even disability benefits (Colley 2006: 25). 40. It is sometimes acknowledged that diagnosis has a downside: dyspraxia may be seen as a burdensome ‘life sentence’ (Drew 2005: 25–6), and being diagnosed with a ‘disorder’ may itself carry a stigma: ‘Occasionally I come across people who think that if I sneeze they’ll catch my “disease” ’ (Biggs 2005: 145). 41. There is something like this ambiguity fairly explicit in the way in which we think about ordinary adolescent clumsiness: we may fluctuate between blaming the gawky teenager for knocking things over and explaining it away as ‘that’s what teenagers are like’. 42. The best anthropologists and sociologists will recognize this notion of a lived dilemma. I have in mind such books as Kathy Davis’s (1995) studies of cosmetic surgery. For a woman in Western societies at least, to see cosmetic surgery as unproblematic – either as unproblematically acceptable or as unproblematically unacceptable – is precisely to miss what is interesting and disturbing about it.

References Bergson, H. (1910). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Tr. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin/New York: Macmillan. (Original French publication: Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience, 1889.) Bergson, H. (1911). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. London: Macmillan & Co. (Original French publication as three separate articles in the Revue de Paris, 1899.) Biggs, V. (2005). Caged in Chaos: A Dyspraxic Guide to Breaking Free. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley. Blijlevens, H. (2005) ‘The experience of dyspraxia in everyday activities: A phenomenological study’. MA thesis, Auckland University of Technology. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Tr. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original French publiation: Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, 1972.) Canguilhem, G. (1966). Le normal et le pathologique, augmenté de Nouvelles réflexions concernant le normal et le pathologique. Paris: PUF. (Earlier version: Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, 1943. English translation: The Normal and the Pathological. Tr. C. R. Fawcett, ed. R. S. Cohen. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978.) Colley, M. (2006). Living with Dyspraxia: A Guide for Adults with Developmental Dyspraxia (revised edition). London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.

182 Katherine J. Morris Davis, K. (1995). Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. London and New York: Routledge. Drew, S. (2005). Developmental Co-ordination Disorder in Adults. Chichester: Whurr/John Wiley & Sons. Eckersley, J. (2004). Coping with Dyspraxia. London: Sheldon Press. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. (Original French publication: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975.) Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Grant, D. (2005). That’s the Way I Think: Dyslexia and Dyspraxia Explained. London: David Fulton. Hessell, S. C. (2006). ‘An ethnography of children with dyspraxia participating in gymnastics’. MA thesis, Auckland University of Technology. Inahara, M. (2009a). ‘This body which is not one: femininity and disability’. Body and Society, 15, 1: 47–62. Inahara, M. (2009b). Abject Love: Undoing the Boundaries of Physical Disability. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the Other Woman. Tr. G. C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kirby, A. (1999). Dyspraxia: The Hidden Handicap. London: Souvenir Press. Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Littlewood, R. and Lipsedge, M. (1997). Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry (ed. 3). Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge. Mol, A. (1998). ‘Lived reality and the multiplicity of norms: a critical tribute to Georges Canguilhem’. Economy and Society 27, 2/3: 274–84. Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Morris, K. J. (2003). ‘The phenomenology of body dysmorphic disorder.’ In K. W. M. Fulford, K. J. Morris, J. Z. Sadler and G. Stanghellini, eds. Nature and Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orbach, Susie (2009). Bodies. London: Profile Books. Philpott, M. J. (1998). ‘A phenomenology of dyslexia: the lived-body, ambiguity, and the breakdown of expression’. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 5, 1: 1–19. Portwood, M. (1996). Developmental Dyspraxia: A Practical Manual for Parents and Professionals. Durham: Durham County Council. Sacks, O. (1985) The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books. Sacks, O. (1990). A Leg to Stand On. New York: HarperPerennial. Sacks, O. (1995). An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Vintage/Random House. Sartre, J-P. (1946). Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Gallimard. (English translation: Anti-Semite and Jew. Tr. G. J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.) Shusterman, R. (2005), ‘The silent, limping body of philosophy’. In T. Carman and M. B. N. Hansen, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 151–80. Widdershoven, G. A. M. ‘Commentary on [Philpott’s] “A phenomenology of dyslexia” ’. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 5, 1: 29–31. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Tr. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

11 Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith Lewis R. Gordon

In April 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon met in a café in Rome. The meeting, at least as recorded by de Beauvoir, went on for hours, reportedly until two in the morning, to the point of Sartre’s 56year-old body suffering fatigue. Sartre was in need of rest, urged de Beauvoir. Fanon, his 36-year-old body dying from leukaemia, resented her insistence: ‘I don’t like men who hoard their resources.’1 He wished to take advantage of that golden opportunity of talking to Sartre for weeks without rest if necessary. Yet, exhaustion prevailed, although the legendary meeting consisted of non-stop conversation for nearly three days. Sartre, impressed by the young revolutionary, had agreed to write the preface for The Wretched of the Earth, a work reputedly composed over ten strained weeks, and he and the editorial collective also agreed to publish the first chapter in the June issue of Les Temps modernes. Fanon’s health worsened as the year went on. He eventually went to Bethesda, Maryland, for treatment in late November, where he was detained by the CIA and denied treatment. He died on 6 December from pneumonia. That meeting, although in the flesh as it were, received a prelude in a variety of texts. Fanon, first by way of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with whom he studied at Lyons, and then through his engagements with the Negritude writers, had an ambivalent relation to Sartre, which he admitted in Black Skin, White Masks.2 He saw Sartre as a friend of black liberation causes, but he also saw him, in the zeal with which he attempted to conjoin existentialism with Marxism in ‘Black Orpheus’, as one of those proverbial friends who made enemies more welcome. It was Sartre’s resolute discussion of French colonialism as racist and the dynamics of terror in his Critique of Dialectical Reason that impressed Fanon, and no doubt the meeting of the two in 1961 offered much for the reflections Sartre subsequently wrote in Rome in 1964. Yet the meeting of the two was also philosophical. In Black Skin, White Masks, the presence of Sartre is evident, albeit critically. Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism in Anti-Semite and Jew, his discussion of Negritude as a negative dialectical moment in ‘Black Orpheus’ and his negative formulation 183

184 Lewis R. Gordon

of freedom and human reality from Being and Nothingness receive attention in Fanon’s exploration of racism and colonialism as assaults on the dignity of human being or human reality. Racism, however, is very much about embodied reality, and although Fanon does not always refer to Sartre in his discussion, the basic point of alienated embodiment, of the body distanced from itself, of the body wrapped in a way of being weighted down by its own denial of agency, brings the two thinkers together productively. The Fanonian addition, however, is to explore in more detail what is suggested, often presumed and at times written around in Sartre’s early thought and brought to near structural thickness in his later work, although Sartre throughout takes the dynamic of agency seriously – namely, the significance of social reality on bodily formation. In the Fanonian corpus, this consideration is of the sociogenesis of racism and colonized constructions of the self. To this, I would add the symbolic transformation of intersubjective relations or, in a word, culture. Insight into the problem addressed by Sartre and Fanon has foundations in Descartes’s Meditations, with a dialectical transformation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but more closely linked in its genealogy to the formulations posed by Edmund Husserl, especially in his Cartesian Meditations.3 As posed by Husserl, the problem was not simply the question of other minds or other selves but also of what is involved in analogical reasoning where, in thinking about that other’s standpoint, one is in touch with that other as, first, a subjectivity, which one realizes as a human, embodied subjectivity.4 Racism, however, as Fanon showed, involves denying even the humanity of certain groups of other people. That meant that the Self/Other dialectic had to move through a veil in which the presumption was that on the other side waited that which was questionably human at best, which challenged any ascription of self and other. The problem was thus posed on the level of apprehending the subjective standpoint of another species. With such an imposition, there was good reason to expect the possibility of more than the intersubjective moment of eye contact, the semiotics of touch, or realized utterances in encounters between human beings facing such difference; empathy, in this instance, stands as the condition whose denial entails a collapse into self-denial. One could appeal to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for criticisms of this form of denial of human-to-human relationship, which, he argued, involved suppressing that encounter both outwardly and inwardly.5 Sartre’s argument, in sum, begins with arguing for the impossibility of disembodied consciousness. Consciousness without a somewhere will be everywhere, the consequence of which is to be nowhere.6 That somewhere is the body, by which he means the point of departure on the world or the directedness from which intentionality is constituted. This point, Sartre insists, is consciousness in the flesh. One could argue that Sartre is being presumptuous here, since the materiality of consciousness, as flesh, already presupposes a

Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith

185

particular type of existence. Since it is human beings with which he is most concerned, the formulation of flesh presupposes an organism of flesh, a permeating nervous system, and a vascular system with an inner endoskeleton. There is a logic that follows in the analysis from creatures with a strong infrastructure and a vulnerable, sensitive exterior. There is no reason for consciousness not to exist in an organism with an exoskeleton encasing its vulnerable features, although the concept of reach or extension may be affected in a radically different way. And beyond the models of mammals and insects, one could think of still more complex manifestations of embodied consciousness without flesh, for example in organisms for whom the generation of conscious data is rooted in liquid or gaseous strings of grammatical information. What remains, however, is that for any of these formulations, several relations continue to hold: That although materially different, each stands as an instance of embodiment; that as forms of consciousness, they are directed at other things or objects; that as embodied, they can be identified by other forms of consciousness; and if capable of recognizing being identified, they hold the possibility of additionally generated relations and activities. Freedom, as Sartre argues it, is manifested in these relations where each can be denied in relation to the point of their upsurge. By this, he means embodied consciousness attempting to deny being such. This denial is multidirectional. Consider, for example, the denial of others, even the notion of otherness. The outer/inner distinction militates against the solipsism occasioned by such a denial, for in effect it exemplifies a desire to be the only point of view, to be, literally, the world. How can there be inner/outer relations, however, when there is nowhere beyond the self? Such a self could not emerge as self except where distinguished from another self. A similar problem emerges from the presumption of only others’ points of view counting but not one’s own. The contradictions are in the assertion of such a point of view as an absence of a point of view. Sartre’s expression for this phenomenon is mauvaise foi, ‘bad faith’. Before summarizing his discussion of bad faith, however, I should like to add a consideration on the problem of inner and outer distinctions. Sartre, after all, rejected such distinctions as among those ‘embarrassing dualisms’ that haunt modern thought. His argument about transphenomenality and its relation to intentionality in his introduction to Being and Nothingness, where the being of the phenomenon transcends it and transcendence emerges in the intentional moment by virtue of the object of consciousness being other than consciousness, throws the site of emergence, of upsurge, even of the questioning of phenomena and the being of phenomena, in the open. In effect, that means, at least for his analysis of the body, that there is no private embodiment. We move through the world as a revealed reality, wherein, at least through the ways in which that reality is lived, we enjoy adverbial efforts of concealment. The inner/outer distinction, then, at least in this context, is more about the presumed thematics for the asserted argument.

186 Lewis R. Gordon

It is in defending my concealed inner self that I collapse into an overdetermined outer world devoid of others as limits of my reach. And in the case of masochism, it is in making myself the point that fixes all others that I fail to see how my denial of my own freedom demanded the erasure of others’. Returning to bad faith, that attitude or mode of self-reference is an act of consciousness turning on itself and negating itself, and since consciousness must be embodied, it follows that bad faith is also a bodily phenomenon. Analyses of bad faith, in other words, bring with them the materiality of the body in bad faith, the bodily manifestation of bad faith and bad faith as an orientation against, or overly saturated to the point of eliminating, embodiment. Although Sartre is not wont to present his mode of argumentation as transcendental, primarily because of his commitments to contingency and anti-essentialism, certain limitations emerge without recourse to that form of argumentation. Transcendental arguments, as justifications premised on conditions of possibility, come to the fore where the concern is not about being in bad faith but about its possibility. If, for example, presenting oneself as a sadistic standpoint on the world, wherein there are no others but the self, is a form of bad faith, then its contradiction must be possible, otherwise the claim would simply be true or at least consistently held. Its inconsistency, however, by virtue of not being able to arise without its contradiction (for without the possibility of even others the notion of a self, a differentiating concept, would not arise) means that both sadism and masochism, two forms of bad faith, depend on their failure. Since both extremes depend on the elimination of intersubjective relations, of social relations, then the mediating consideration, in fact the transcendental condition, of bad faith is social reality. To say that a relationship is social, albeit pointing to intersubjectivity, does not reveal much about the phenomenon. That consciousness is embodied, for instance, raises the question of how and what is communicated in the ‘inter’-relationship. For if an embodied consciousness is ‘here’ and another or others are ‘there’, how else could either emerge except through an act of perception? But perceptivity is not simply a directed activity, as with a metaphor of a line and arrow aiming at a point, since there is an entire field and spatial expansion of the relationship. Intersubjectivity, in other words, manifests itself through a shared world, and that world is populated with meanings. At a basic level, there is signification of things in that world, but that alone would be insufficient to address the complex phenomena manifested by bad faith. If only significative, the phenomena could function as extensions in a behavioural scheme of reactions in which sign and signified become one. There will, in other words, be an isomorphic relationship between signs and signified, which would leave little room for the manipulation of evidence, the advancement of false criteria for belief and the multitude of other resources by which bad faith activity is made manifest. What will be needed is the transition from sign to symbol, from signification to meaning. It is at this level, the symbolic, in which bodily bad faith takes


187

many forms, for symbols offer themselves, as Ernst Cassirer has argued, as whole worlds in which lived reality is organized, even in competition with each other, as is the case between religion, myth, magic and science.7 Although they were critics of each other’s work, the purview of the symbolic is a point of meeting for Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, for both saw the important effects of magical thinking on embodied consciousness.8 Magic is the effort to control and dominate reality by bringing into being that which seems to have come from nothing.9 In Outline of the Emotions, for instance, Sartre argued that the emotions could manifest themselves as assertions of magic on reality with the effect of biophysical breakdowns or endorphic seizures of temporal reality.10 In Structural Anthropology, LéviStrauss explored the force of what a belief in magic has on the believer, and his conclusion of the force of competing realities reveals the relative coordination of mythic presuppositions of non-mythical standpoints.11 Crucial here for our purposes is the understanding of how the symbolic life of the social, which we could here call the cultural, collapses schisms between material and epiphenomenal or immaterial reality. Cultural symbols endow intentionality with a fullness that makes it seem incapable of resistance against such structural imposition. Sartre’s reminder of bad faith brings to the structural symbolic the additional grammar of adverbial meaning. How consciousnesses in the flesh act offers a reservoir of additional meanings to emerge from the generative grammar of culture. Where Sartre and LéviStrauss part company is on, though not exclusively so, the significance of the dualisms generated by magical, mythical and even scientific acts. Sartre is trying to overcome many of these dualisms, whereas Lévi-Strauss sees them as part of a continuum in the constitutional order of what we are as biophysical beings. In other words, having two eyes, a bifocal brain, a front and a back, a left and a right, and so on, organizes our symbolic life in dualisms, many of which challenge resolution on a par with debates on whether light is a wave or a particle, or on whether everything is reducible to a single being or a relation, or on whether there is change or nothing ever changes. Fanon meets these two great intellectuals, along with others who have examined the lived reality of culture such as Karl Jaspers and Jacques Lacan, here. Fanon’s analysis draws on several insights from the existential phenomenological treatment of agency, structure and intersubjective relations in Black Skin, White Masks and also in A Dying Colonialism. In the first, there is the struggle of embodied consciousness weighted down by a social world that fixes some people into an overdetermined point as one would trail a micro-organism injected by a tracing dye. In the second, the transformability of social reality is made manifest by the shifting symbolic force of dress and social action. The body is very much present throughout Black Skin, White Masks. This is because, in raising the problem of the black body, Fanon also raises the problem of bodily normativity, wherein the body, as the body that exists

188 Lewis R. Gordon

itself, as the embodied agent, has been presumed white in the modern West. I say the modern West because such a presumption was a function of specific historical forces. In the pre-modern world, prototypical formulations had unfolded in the transition from medieval Christendom to the construction of modern man. Medieval Christendom was marked first by its emergence as a normative category, where to be legitimately human was to be Christian as the teleological practice of G-d from creation to crucifixion and resurrection. The emergence of Islam, the continuation of Judaism through Rabbinic Judaism and the blocked expansion of Christendom by the eighth century in the Mediterranean, northern Africa and West Asia challenged Christian normativity to the point of its reassertion through a natural theology that collapsed Christian into human, and Moors and Jews into a subcategory with breeds of horses and dogs – namely, raza, the genealogical source of the modern term race.12 That path was an historical one from theological naturalism (to be natural was to be within the proper purview of G-d) to modern naturalism (to be natural was to be part of a recurring and eventually surviving process of nature). The legacy of the transformation of the Christian body into the European body, however, meant that the black body, as a nonoriginal body or as a deviating body (more linked to Moor and Jew), meant its status also as a fallen body. That the grammar of Christianity reached the modern world with a continued sense of original fall meant that the black body was a twice-fallen body, a body fallen from a fallen body. In his introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, this twice-fallen reality is described as ‘a zone of nonbeing’: the black man is not a man. [That is because] there is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell [Enfer].13 This collapse, if we will, places the black body into a variety of schematized deviations of difference and imitation. As difference, it falls from the white body. One may wonder why it does not rise from the white body? The normativity of the white body would make even that movement illegitimate in a schema in which to be too much, in either lower or higher, is to be a failure. As imitation, the problem becomes the difference from the original. As imitation, what is lacked is an original advantage of self as standard. The imitation, in other words, is held by a standard of not being itself. It fails, in other words, even in its achievement. To achieve imitation is to fail at what an imitation imitates, namely, an original. The converged failure of these two directions Fanon regards, in stream with Lévi-Strauss’s willingness to work with the dualisms of human subjectivity and the mythic life of human imagination, as a productive site of analysis.14 This is not to say that Sartre


189

did not to some extent share this view. Bad faith, at least as I have interpreted his thought, is a ‘determined attitude which is essential to human reality’, and it is one that has proved fruitful in the course of his explorations of human phenomena ranging from anti-Semitism to the sedimentation of practice, the efforts to construct a closed and overdetermined dialectic, and the folly of a completed self-understanding of the bourgeois writer.15 ‘Failure’ for Fanon points to a diagnosis or, more properly, a socio-diagnosis, since Fanon argues that the normative situation is a social phenomenon that lends itself to psychoanalysis: If there can be no discussion on a philosophical level – that is, the plane of the basic needs of human reality – I am willing to work on the psychoanalytical level – in other words, the level of the ‘failures’, in the sense in which one speaks of engine failures.16 That Fanon admits that he is ‘willing to work on the psychoanalytical level’ alerts us to the limitations of such an approach as well, that working on the level of failure too is a form of failure, which makes psychoanalysis a form of concession instead of an ideal; as falling short, it too must be transcended. This is no surprise, given the existential predilections of Fanon’s analysis. Like Sartre, contingency for him is a limiting factor on any analysis of the human condition; the analysis is true for some, maybe even most, but, short of superficial formalism, never so for all. Fanon’s course of action is to take a path through a minefield of failures. From the outset, he announced the failures of phylogenic and ontogenic analyses and offered the path of a sociogenic analysis, which as I have already pointed out calls for more cultural richness than the mere term ‘social’ offers. That path calls for a reminder, however, of the role of human agency: ‘[For] society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being.’17 The black body, here also marked as the ‘black soul’ since their separation has already been rejected by the limits of inner/outer failures, demands demystification through an analysis of its source: ‘what is called the black soul is a white construction.’18 This construction, a failure of human understanding, asserts itself through a variety of idolatrous offerings: language, bad faith love and law-like constitutional theories of psychic life, to name three. In each, the force of deviation and imitation reveal failure: to speak, not as a speaker but as a white speaker, makes black speech an imitation of speech and hence not actual speech, not agency speech. Even as an effect of a wider structure, the problem is that the black effect is treated as an echo of white normality, to speak, in other words like a white. Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world. I have had

190 Lewis R. Gordon

occasion to talk with students of foreign origin. They speak French badly: Little Crusoe, alias Prospero, is at ease then. He explains, informs, interprets, helps them with their studies.19 With love, the ordered expectations, in at least Lacanian semiosis, of a normative order at which gender difference is ontologically basic fall under the weight of colonial imposition: whether black woman or black man, the normative centre is white man, not even white woman. And at the constitutional level, the symbolic expectations fall sway to the factual correlates of analogical and reductive interpretation: a gun, in the dream life of the colonized, is a gun. These series of failures are revisited through an autobiography of the author that, since his individuality was already marked out of the schema, is not an autobiography. Put differently, the metastructure of self-reference means that Fanon, referring to Fanon, fails at the individuated narrative, since he collapses into the black through whom the meaning of autobiography as inner life, as mythic self-report, functions on a plane that is different from that of ordinary autobiography. Fanon, in other words, in the autobiographical moment is asserting the upsurge of that whose possibility was already denied as a possibility. It is, in other words, an act of magic. Fanon’s magical autobiographical reflection announces itself immediately from the body, or at least the discourse on embodiment. In the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, his body emerges as not only seen, but also identified by the words of a surprised, shocked and eventually frightened little white boy: ‘ “Dirty nègre!” or simply, “Look, a nègre!” ’ (Given the ambiguity of the word nègre, meaning Negro and nigger, I’ll employ the French term from this point onward.) The chapter’s thematic of lived experience, of being willing to work on the plane of lived experience of a structure imposition, raises the question of the subject through whom language speaks. The language, embodied in the little white boy who made the exclamation when he saw Fanon walking in Lyons, triggered the black body through whom the society’s racist language, which was in that world language itself, spoke. Fanon was frozen, perhaps reminiscent of the centre of the Inferno as portrayed by Dante – a centre of icy hatred and revenge – facing a struggle against a consequent cold exteriority where he stood ‘outside’, devoid of an inside, not of the failed private life of which Sartre offered critique but of the negation by which objects can be posed as such, in other words, of an intentional point of view.20 For Fanon, who had achieved a level of naivety that enabled him to walk through the world as belonging to the language, the culture, the social world as an intersubjective relation of possibility, the effect was of a fallen fall: I arrived in the world anxious to make sense of things, my spirit filled with desire to be at the origin of the world, and here I discovered myself an object amongst other objects.


191

Imprisoned in this overwhelming objectivity, I implored others. Their liberating regard, running over my body, which suddenly became smooth, returns to me a lightness that I believed lost, and, absenting me from the world, returns me to the world. But there, just at the opposite slope, I stumble, and the other, by gestures, attitudes, looks, fixed me, in the sense that one fixes a chemical preparation with a dye. I was furious. I demanded an explanation. . . . Nothing happened. I exploded. Now, the tiny pieces are collected by another self.21 The recollection of the self of which Fanon writes is the body offered back to him, the body that appears in mirrors, albeit looked at before, now seen in a different way. The mirror after all becomes a perspective from which he had presumed himself a participant in a shared attitude toward a particular object to which he was not identical. In seeing himself through the perspective of how he is seen by whites, his consciousness shifted from simply an antinègre to that of the nègre self. That self, that body, which he never associated with his body, fell from the fallen into his perceptual field. The result was two movements of the Du Boisian version of double consciousness.22 The first, seeing oneself through the eyes of the hostile Other, is the alienated reality of which Sartre and Fanon later wrote. But the second, which Paget Henry has called potentiated double consciousness, is the realization of the first as a constructed reality.23 That involves demonstration of the contradictions of the imposed self (the fall after the fall) on the lived reality of the self in mundane life, which offers itself as a dialectical demonstration of conflicting cultural logics where once universals become particularized. For Fanon, this demonstration had already begun with the appeal to social diagnostics and continued through the analysis of failures. It went further through the radicality of the analysis, which challenged even its methodological assumptions: ‘There is a point at which methods devour themselves.’24 That even method must be subject to critique meant that the radicality of object formation called for its normative assumptions being parenthesized, marked or suspended. The move is patently phenomenological, but since it cannot even presume phenomenology as valid, it is, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres recently argued, decolonial.25 This decolonial movement, existential and phenomenological in character by virtue of its realized link to the Sartrean identification of bad faith even at methodological levels (failure, that is, of norms of evidence and assessment), brings phenomena to the fore in an act of potentiated double consciousness. At the point of bodily identification, of himself as the nègre, Fanon reflects: An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating

192 Lewis R. Gordon

activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.26 This stage, when ‘solely a negating activity’, is locked into a form of the self which Sartre identified as one of three ontological structures of the body, as the body as a consciousness that is known as a body for the Other or others. By contrast, Fanon draws from a mundane experience of comportment: I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world – such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world – definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.27 By contrast, white normativity, ‘a historical-racial schema’, leads the body of the nègre, in its appearance as such a body, to turn inward. It becomes a conflict with itself, an alienated object, in which there is always a demand for more than the ordinary living of self, wherein even the ordinary would be an extraordinary achievement: I had sketched a historico-schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by [quoting Jean Lhermitte] ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,’ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.28 The result is a body saturated with endless self-negations of de trop, too much: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Y a bon banania!’29 Bon Banania is the name of a popular cocoa-banana cereal whose iconic figure in the company’s advertisements was a Senegalese soldier, who, in


193

turn, became known as bon banania. ‘Y a bon’ is an African patois or creolized formulation of, ‘c’est bon’, ‘it is good’. The linguistic marker points to a supposed authenticity through which a native African, a supposedly true connoisseur of banana and cocoa, authenticates the cereal. The subtextual marker, or the underlying structural signifiers, as Lévi-Strauss and others might argue, are the mythic evocations of a relationship between native Africans and apes, a connection further established by a reference to bananas. Thus, over the years, the image of Bon Banania became more simian, to the point of simply a dark, monkey-looking head wearing a fez, with the continued: ‘Y a bon banania!’ The eclipsing of Bon Banania’s torso meant, as well, the eclipsing of a clothed body save for the hat, which meant, in effect a mouth with a broad smile.30 The orality of the nègre, whether as smile or as continued rationalizations of ‘oral culture’, is thrown into the tide of overdetermined forces, the effect of which was that, as Fanon autobiographically reflected: ‘My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.’31 The black body is weighted down with overdetermined historical-racial forces: Les Nègres are savages, brutes, and illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false. There was a myth of the nègre that had to be destroyed at all costs. The time had long since passed when a nègre priest was an occasion for wonder. We had physicians, professors, statesmen. Yes, but something out of the ordinary still clung to such cases. ‘We have a Senegalese history teacher. He is quite bright. . . . Our doctor is colored. He is very gentle.’ It was always the nègre teacher, the nègre doctor; brittle as I was becoming, I shivered at the slightest pretext. I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a nègre physician? As long as everything went well, he was praised to the skies, but look out, no nonsense, under any conditions! The black physician can never be sure how close he is to disgrace. I tell you, I was walled in: No exception was made for my refined manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of the quantum theory.32 Fanon points here to two dimensions of the black body under the weight of historical-racial schematization. There is at first the logic of rule and exception, where the system could be maintained in spite of individual progress: Regarding an achieved black person as an exception to a rule of black inferiority maintains the rule. (The logic is preserved through an inversion with whites: a white person’s failure is treated as an exception to the rule of white superiority.) This logic enables the emergence of a black body as an exception to black bodies, yet as an exception, it is at war with its ergon

194 Lewis R. Gordon

or inner principle of function. The consequence is one not of the absence of pathology, but of its containment: the exception, in other words, is the absoluteness of the rule waiting to come out. That lurking reassertion of mythic cohesion leads to the second dimension, the heaviness of action saturated by the historical-racial schema. It leads to a hardening of the body and inhibition of its motion, of its becoming ‘brittle’, which pushes the body into an isomorphic relation with projected social expectations. The effect, in existential language, is the construction of an essence that precedes the existential understanding of possibility; in other words, whereas to be human means to live one’s existence as a precedence to one’s essence (biography, history, obituary), there is here an essence that precedes existence, the effect of which is an implosion of the self into the realm, given the factor of an obituary, of the dead. The theme of a fallen fall into the zone of non-being returns. Anticipating the reassertion of racism in contemporary genetics, where the body is understood through nano-level biochemical strings of information of its operations, Fanon articulates the verdict: ‘My chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing cannibalism. In addition to the sex-linked, the scholars had now discovered the racial-linked. What a shameful science!’33 The black body, then, as seen through the order of symbolic forces of racist culture in the social world that overdetermines it, is one of an echoed inner physiology. In other words, the morphology of blackness is an effect of an atomic-level string of causal mechanisms. Returning to an existential phenomenology of embodied consciousness, the result is clear: a consciousness without freedom. In the Sartrean worldview, the idea of a consciousness without a freedom is an impossibility. In living, which amounts to living our body, living ourselves, we are freedom, although, as our exploration of Fanon reveals, the effect of anti-black racism is the antithesis of this: it demands not living and being conscious of not doing so. The nègre, then, faces an additional imposition on the self in a social world of expected consciousness without freedom, namely, the responsibility for such a lived unlived reality. As Sartre writes: The body is the contingent form which is taken up by the necessity of my contingency. We can never apprehend this contingency as such in so far as our body is for us [which the black body is not]; for we are a choice, and for us, to be is to choose ourselves. Even this disability from which I suffer I have assumed by the very fact that I live; I surpass it toward my own projects, I make of it the necessary obstacle for my being, and I can not be crippled without choosing myself as crippled. This means that I choose the way in which I constitute my disability (as ‘unbearable,’ ‘humiliating,’ ‘to be hidden,’ ‘to be revealed to all,’ ‘an object of pride,’ ‘the justification for my failures,’ and so on). But this inapprehensible body is precisely the necessity that there be a choice, that I do not exist all at once. In this sense my finitude is the condition of my freedom, for


195

there is no freedom without choice; and in the same way that the body conditions consciousness as pure consciousness of the world, it renders consciousness possible even in its very freedom.34 Sartre’s argument is that the nègre thus struggles with the meaning of her or his unfreedom, wherein the reality of the struggle is itself a manifestation of freedom. It is, in other words, an expression of freedom in unfreedom. That expression, however, being ever-increasingly inward directed, takes the form of implosion: it is a form of suffering that we shall call, given its prosaic familiarity, oppression. An effect of oppression is the set of additions to negotiate in one’s effort to live ordinary existence. Although the ordinary, from the perspective of phenomenological treatments of the social world, should be understood as an extraordinary achievement, it is so through precisely that: its ordinariness. Most people, with nearly no effort, obey the set of rules or practices that enable coexistence. We human beings live together in ways that facilitate a generally unimpeded dialectic between body and world. Oppression, however, weighs down each moment of bodily reach, as Fanon observed, which makes the extraordinary achievement of the ordinary even more extraordinary. There is, in other words, a re-evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary life, which means, then the lived reality of the oppressed body as a body de trop, a body overflowing with superfluity. It is, in other words, a body of extremes. It is a body that is ‘too much’ of whatever quality considered because of having diverted from the normal harmony of embodiment: to be black, it has fallen away from normativity; to be black is, in other words, to be too black since to be just right is to not have been black at all. As, then, a reaching consciousness brought down under the weight of a historical-racial schema, the black body faces constantly, in the black effort to participate in the social world, the world of others, the threat of becoming slimy. As Fanon lamented, ‘I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling.’35 Sartre’s reflections on slime anticipated this suffering reality: ‘the slimy reveals itself as essentially ambiguous because its fluidity exists in slow motion; there is a sticky thickness in its liquidity; it represents in itself a dawning triumph of the solid over the liquid . . . ’36 Such a saturation of existence is not only a form of bad faith on which Sartre wrote with alarm on the level of the phobic but also a suffering of which his understanding seemed almost vicarious: Slime is the agony of water. It presents itself as a phenomenon in process of becoming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has but on the contrary represents an accomplished break in a change of state. This fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession . . . . The slimy flees with a heavy flight which has the same relation to water as the unwieldy earthbound flight of the chicken as to that of the hawk.

196 Lewis R. Gordon

Even this flight can not be possessed because it denies itself as flight. It is already almost a solid permanence. Nothing testifies more clearly to its ambiguous character as a ‘substance in between two states’ than the slowness with which the slimy melts into itself.37 Sartre here articulates the quality of being found in the sticky, weighteddown historical-racial schema, one with the agony of consciousness of disavowed freedom. He and Fanon sought an understanding of freedomaffirming action. For both, this called for a radical transformation of consciousness, which, given the theme of embodiment, means as well the transformation of the body. Sartre attempted such development later on through an exploration of impositions of inertia on practice, as seen in his Critique of Dialectical Reason.38 The heaviness of historical forces on embodied reality is evident in that work, especially in his long discussion of racism in colonial Algeria. There and in many of his writings, Sartre also defended the importance of revolutionary practice, wherein cultural and economic orders limiting human action through the fostering of implosive behaviour may be overthrown in the additional project of constructing institutions conducive for freedom-directed human activity. Fanon’s thought ultimately shared such a path as evidenced by his analyses of human struggles to break free of the enmeshing, slimy demands of consciousness without freedom. In each instance, the potential of cultural transformation as a bodily phenomenon comes to the fore. In A Dying Colonialism, the Algerian woman’s various transformations of bodily representation present new considerations for the postcolonial state, for the Algerian woman who carries bombs, who experiences herself in western clothing, who learns acts of comportment in military campaigns, exemplifies an upsurge whose containment is a dialectic of body and world beyond a consciousness without freedom to one fighting for it.39 In The Wretched of the Earth, the plea takes the form of asking, in the concluding sentence, for the development of ‘new skin’ through which a new humanity could be born.40 Yet in the early Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon had concluded with a consideration on bodily freedom thus: My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions! For the body ensnared by a social world infected with dehumanizing cultural forces, one suffering the sliminess of consciousness without freedom, the move from affected movement, from being forced into a thing under the weight of descriptive edicts, to the interrogative, where possibility is posed by the phenomenon of questioning. As oppressed embodied consciousness is overly determined inward, the direction of one marked by interrogating that oppression points outward; it is a potentiated, embodied


197

double consciousness born of a dialectical critique of the second ontological structure, namely, the body as seen and known by others. By pushing interrogation onto the second ontological moment, the problem of the body to the embodied self, the body to the body, the social world then emerges as an object of critical inquiry, communication, and engagement. The analyses of the body offered by Sartre and Fanon no doubt face many challenges in the wake of poststructuralist accounts in which the body is now read through near-ubiquitous technologies of surveillance the effect of which, as Foucault observed, is the body becoming a prisoner of the soul.41 Yet, as I hope the analysis I have offered reveals, this insight is one with which Sartre and Fanon offered early formulations. Contemporary treatments tend to focus on the imposing social structures on the body with the seeming effect of the body as a point without a view, of an absence of freedom and consciousness.42 Why this is so is not, however, entirely clear since, from such theoretical approaches, it is only language or the social systems that function as agents by which subjectivity is constituted. The body in bad faith, a thematic through which Sartre and Fanon articulate the agony of oppression, brings to the fore a point of view from which, at least in the impasses it faces, the lived reality of a body imprisoned by the soul can be understood.

Notes 1. The meeting is recounted by de Beauvoir (1992), as well as by Cherki (2006). Cf. Hayman 1987: 384. 2. Fanon 1967a: cf., for example, 134–5. I will at times revise the translation. 3. The problem has also been presented in a fascinating way in analytical philosophy by Nagel (1974). Nagel concludes the article with some, in effect, phenomenological speculations on the nature of objective explanation; compare also Nagel 1989, which borrows heavily from Merleau-Ponty’s PP; see especially Merleau-Ponty’s reflections in his preface. 4. See, for example, Husserl (1960), the Fifth Meditation. 5. See Sartre’s discussion of sadism and the body in Part III, chapters 2 and 3 of BN, and for commentary, see discussions in L. R. Gordon 1995, chapter 2 and L. R. Gordon 2000, chapter 4. See also the discussion of the body in bad faith in L. R. Gordon 1995, Part I. 6. BN 407. 7. See, for instance, Cassirer 1955. 8. See Lévi-Strauss 1963, Part III: ‘Magic and Religion’. 9. Cf. Cavendish 1990: 2. 10. Sartre 1948. For discussion, see L. R. Gordon 1995, Part II. 11. Lévi-Strauss 1963: 230. 12. See Nirenberg 2007. 13. Fanon 1967a: 8 (translation revised). 14. Lévi-Strauss 1995.

198 Lewis R. Gordon 15. BN 87. ‘The bourgeois writer’ alludes to The Family Idiot, Sartre’s studies of Gustave Flaubert. 16. Fanon 1967a: 23. For discussion, see Gordon 2005. 17. Fanon 1967a: 11. 18. Fanon 1967a: 14 (translation revised). 19. Fanon 1967a: 36. 20. See Dante’s Inferno, XXXIII. 21. Fanon 1967a: 109 (translation revised). 22. See Du Bois 1903. For discussion, see Allen 1997 and J. A. Gordon 2007. 23. Henry 2005. 24. Henry 2005: 12. 25. Maldonado-Torres 2007. 26. Fanon 1967a: 110–11. 27. Fanon 1967a: 111. 28. Fanon 1967a. 29. Fanon 1967a: 112. 30. For more on Bon Banania, see Pieterse 1992: 162. 31. Fanon 1967a: 113. 32. Fanon 1967a: 117. 33. Fanon 1967a: 120. 34. BN 432. 35. Fanon 1967a: 116. 36. BN 774. 37. BN 774. 38. See Sartre 1976; for discussion, see, for instance, McBride 1991. 39. Fanon 1967b. Discussions are many, but see Cornell 2001. 40. Fanon 1963. 41. Foucault 1975. 42. Cf. Caws 1992.

References Allen, E. (1997). ‘On the reading of riddles: re-thinking Du Boisian “double consciousness” ’. In L. R. Gordon, ed. Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 49–68. Beauvoir, S. de (1992). Force of Circumstance: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir. Tr. P. Greene. New York: Paragon. Cassirer, E. (1955). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical Thought. Tr. R. Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cavendish, R. (1990). A History of Magic. London: Arkana. Caws, P. (1992). ‘Sartrean structuralism?’ In The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Ed. C. Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 293–317. Cherki, A. (2006). Fanon: A Portrait. Tr. N. Benabid. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cornell, D. (2001). ‘The secret behind the veil: a reinterpretation of “Algeria Unveiled” ’. Philosophia Africana 4, 2: 27–35. Dante Alighieri (1982), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 1: Inferno. Toronto, CA: Bantam Books. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg.


199

Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967a). Black Skin, White Masks. Tr. C. L. Markman. New York: Grove Press. (Original French publication: Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952.) Fanon, F (1967b). A Dying Colonialism. Tr. H. Chevalier, introduction by A. Gilly. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Gordon, J. A. (2007). ‘The gift of double consciousness: some obstacles to grasping the contributions of the colonized’. In Persram, ed. 143–61. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Gordon, L. R. (2000). Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Gordon, L. R. (2005). ‘Through the zone of nonbeing: a reading of Black Skin, White Masks in celebration of Fanon’s eightieth birthday’. The C. L. R. James Journal, 11, 1: 1–43. Hayman, R. (1987). Sartre: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf. Henry, P. (2005). ‘Africana phenomenology: its philosophical implications’. The C. L. R. James Journal, 11, 1: 79–112. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. Tr. D. Cairns. Dordrecht, Boston, MA and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original German publication: 1929.) Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. Tr. C. Jacobson and B. F. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1995). Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. Foreword by W. Doniger. New York: Schocken Books. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McBride, W. L. (1991). Sartre’s Political Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nagel, T. (1974). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ The Philosophical Review, LXXXIII, 4: 435–50. Nagel, T. (1989). The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford. Nirenberg, D. (2007). ‘Race and the Middle Ages: the case of Spain and its Jews’. In Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. M. R. Greer, W. D. Mignolo and M. Quilligan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 71–87. Persram, N., ed. (2007). Postcolonialism and Political Theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pieterse, J. N. (1992). White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sartre, J-P. (1948). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Tr. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J-P. (1976). Critique of Dialectical Reasoning I. Ed. J. Rée, tr. A. Sheridan-Smith. London: NLB. (Original French publication: 1960.)

12 Sartre in the Company of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Duden Monika Langer

In this chapter I argue that there is an intrinsic connection between the kind of world in which we find ourselves today – a world in environmental crisis – and the kind of body we have created for ourselves. If we are to bring about a positive change in our environmental situation, we must significantly transform our bodily being at the same time. I will contend that Sartre’s phenomenological description better fits our current experience of our body and the world than does Merleau-Ponty’s. Further, I will argue that Sartre’s analyses of the look and the practico-inert can help us understand where we are environmentally today. These analyses also illuminate our alienation from the body and world that may well play a major role in environmental destruction and political conflict. This chapter shows that Foucault’s and Duden’s critiques of the modern body draw on Sartre’s analysis of the look. Further, I demonstrate that combining aspects of Sartre’s philosophy with Merleau-Ponty’s, Foucault’s and Duden’s perspectives yields a fruitful approach to current concerns.1 My attempt to combine aspects of these four thinkers’ positions will undoubtedly seem surprising, given their irreconcilable differences. MerleauPonty criticized Sartre’s philosophy extensively, and Sartre stated that there is a fundamental incompatibility between his philosophy and MerleauPonty’s.2 Moreover, in a wide-ranging interview in 1975 Sartre declared that ‘in certain respects’ he is ‘an anti-Nature philosopher’.3 Further, Foucault explicitly rejected not only Merleau-Ponty’s and Sartre’s philosophies, but phenomenology as such.4 Barbara Duden, a contemporary German historian, said that Foucault’s work has influenced her own. Yet she too would no doubt be somewhat dismayed at having features of her work combined with elements of Sartre’s philosophy. Despite all this, Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Foucault’s and Duden’s perspectives can complement each other. I would like to approach this endeavour in the spirit adopted by Foucault in a 1981 interview, in which he said: ‘so many things can be changed . . . . to say that we are much more recent than we think . . . [is] to place at the disposal of the work that we can do on ourselves the greatest possible share of what is 200

Sartre with Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Duden

201

presented to us as inaccessible’.5 Moreover, as he pointed out in a 1983 interview, ‘it is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and what we are today . . . . to follow and understand, if and how what is, can no longer be what it is’.6 Sartre’s phenomenological description of the body in Being and Nothingness indicates that body and world are interconnected. Our pre-reflective, bodily projects organize the world. More specifically, our perceptions of the world depend on the way in which we live our body and the world’s ‘instrumental-things’ reveal our body to us (BN 398–9). Despite its undeniable importance, however, Sartre’s description of the relationship between body and world is far less developed than is Merleau-Ponty’s. The latter’s phenomenology shows in detail how body and world come into being together and are indissolubly and dynamically interconnected. MerleauPonty’s description of a primordially harmonious relationship between body and world can prompt us to question the more uneasy relationship that many of us presently seem to have with our own body and the world. Sartre’s analyses of ‘the look’ and ‘the practico-inert’ can help us to understand this current, disquieting relationship with our body and the world. Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ of medical perception and Duden’s ‘body history’ can illuminate how we arrived at today’s situation. Further, Foucault’s and Duden’s investigations confirm that body and world are indeed inextricably and dynamically interconnected, and that both body and world change historically. If, as I think, Foucault is correct in claiming that ‘modern technologies of power’ directly penetrate the body, then we also need to consider their impact.7 Duden’s ‘body history’ can help us to see and assess that impact. Foucault envisaged a ‘history of bodies’, but Duden was the first person to undertake such a history. Focusing on women in the eighteenth century and the present, Duden showed that there has been a very significant change in how women experience and live their body. This change accords with the ‘anatamo-politics of the human body’ described by Foucault.8 The relevance of Duden’s ‘body history’ is not restricted to women. As she points out, what happens with women’s bodies is indicative of what happens in the culture as a whole.9 To appreciate what has happened in our culture, let us first consider Merleau-Ponty’s position. Merleau-Ponty says that ‘the human body can be understood only as a perceiving body: perception and the perceived are the key’.10 The most important contribution in his Phenomenology of Perception (PP) is his insight that the perceiving ‘body-subject’ and the perceived world are not given. Rather, they come into being together in an ongoing, dynamic interaction and are inextricably interconnected. Merleau-Ponty draws a fundamental distinction between the perceiving, ‘lived body’ and the objective, anatomically defined body. The latter is a construct that masks the pre-reflective interaction between body and world. It distorts our actual, lived experience of

202 Monika Langer

existing as a ‘body-subject’. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the ‘lived world’ and the objective world. As he points out, ‘[a]ll the sciences situate themselves in a “complete” and real world without realizing that perceptual experience is constituting with respect to this world’.11 In short, neither body nor world is a given, factual entity. Thanks to its powers of perception, the lived body is rooted in and open to the world. Body and world dialectically ‘gear into’ each other. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that at the pre-reflective, lived level of experience, we are completely at one with our body and at home in the world. Moreover, the same is true of our relationship with other people. The lived body is the self, and the world in which this ‘body-subject’ inheres is an intersubjectively shared world. As a bodily subjectivity we are thus inherently open to other body-subjects and interrelated with them. We dialectically ‘gear into’ each other pre-reflectively. Long before we develop any concept of subjectivity or are able to reflect, we already perceive and respond to each other’s intentions bodily. As Merleau-Ponty points out, if I pretend to bite a 15-month-old baby’s finger, the baby opens its mouth. It has a direct, bodily comprehension of my gesture, because pre-reflectively our bodies form a single intersubjective system. The lived intersubjective world into which we are born is also an historical world in which we are simultaneously free and dependent. Further, Merleau-Ponty says that there is a ‘lived’ or ‘internal logic’ in history. The changes that occur have ‘an internal logic, even though at the time they may not be clearly thought out by anyone. They are polarized by the fact that we exist in the eyes of one another, with one another . . . ’.12 Merleau-Ponty’s description of our pre-reflective experience of oneness with our body and of community with others is neither historically nor culturally specific. It thus implies – wrongly, as I see it – that this experience is timeless and universal. My view is that there is no ahistorical, generic experience of embodiment. Rather, our pre-reflective experience is always historically and culturally specific. It seems to me that today, in what is commonly called ‘Western culture’, many or most of us have a more uneasy relationship with our body and the world than Merleau-Ponty’s description would suggest. Increasingly, we seem to experience our body as an objective, anatomically defined body. At the same time, we increasingly seem to experience the world as an objective, ever more threatening environment. To help us understand this objectification, how it has come about and thus how we might develop a more positive relationship with body and world – such as that described by Merleau-Ponty – I will now also consider aspects of Sartre’s, Foucault’s and Duden’s works. As in Merleau-Ponty’s case, Sartre’s description of our pre-reflective experience is not historically or culturally specific. Providing that we reject its implied timelessness and universality, it can contribute to a better understanding of our present situation in Western culture. Like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre stresses that we are all bodily beings situated and engaged in the


203

world.13 Further, the world as we experience it is the outcome of our interaction with brute being. Sartre says in Being and Nothingness that ‘it is impossible . . . to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent’.14 Yet in Sartre’s philosophy any experience of togetherness with other people is extremely tenuous and always based on a primordial relation of conflict. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre insists that ‘[t]he essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein [that is, the Being-with]; it is conflict’.15 According to Sartre, this conflict arises because we are bodily subjectivities and each of us continually experiences the other’s look.16 Once we have felt it, we internalize that look and experience it everywhere, even in the other’s absence.17 In objectifying our body, the other’s gaze alienates us from our being-for-ourself.18 We experience our objectification and alienation, as well as the other’s subjectivity, ‘directly and with [our] being’.19 Sartre stresses that through the other’s look, we are ‘conscious of being an object’.20 We therefore seek to assert our freedom and to re-establish our subjectivity by responding in kind. In Sartre’s view, we cannot escape this alienating, conflictual situation, even though it exists as such only through our freedom.21 In Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France MerleauPonty says about Sartre’s analysis of the look: ‘This is true: this objectivation by the look is a profound truth. . . . But it is a particular case of a more general relation . . . ’.22 Merleau-Ponty refers to this more general relation as ‘intercorporeity’ and ‘Ineinander’.23 Unlike Sartre, he insists that the experience of conflict presupposes the pre-reflective, harmonious interweaving of our perceptual experience with that of others in a shared world. Further, Merleau-Ponty indicates that there are many types of conflict, and that not all are invariably destructive. For instance, a conflict of opinions need not be alienating or paralysing.24 Merleau-Ponty does not elaborate here. However, rather than being disempowering, this kind of conflict can presumably bring a greater appreciation of diversity and lead to mutually enriching, cooperative endeavours. It is important at this juncture to forestall the misinterpretation that Merleau-Ponty’s position is utopian. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem makes it clear that he not only recognizes the reality of conflict, but regards our divisions and conflicts with others ‘as constants’.25 Merleau-Ponty points out that our actions inevitably encroach on other people. In fact, he goes so far as to say that ‘[i]nasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot’.26 Merleau-Ponty declares that, to date, we ‘have only recognized one another implicitly, in conflict and the race for power’.27 In his estimation, ‘[p]olitical problems come from the fact that we are all subjects and yet we look upon other people and treat them as objects’.28 None the less, in Merleau-Ponty’s view even such alienating political or private conflict does not alter our primordially positive, lived relationship with our own body, the other person and the intersubjective world. It is thus all

204 Monika Langer

the more noteworthy that he says the objectification produced by the look ‘is a profound truth’ in Sartre’s analysis. There is an additional point in Sartre’s analysis of the look that is extremely interesting and has received too little attention. It concerns the tremendous change that occurs in both the world and our relationship to it as a result of the look. Sartre says: The Other’s look . . . is not only a transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis of the world. I am looked-at in a world which is lookedat. . . . This look of the Other is . . . that by which distance comes to the world at the heart of a presence without distance. I withdraw; I am stripped of my distanceless presence to my world, and I am provided with a distance from the Other.29 In short, the look simultaneously objectifies our body and objectifies the world. It destroys presence, imposes distance and alienates us not only from our own being, but also from the other and the world. If body and world are inextricably interconnected and come into being together, then this simultaneous objectification of body and world is not surprising. Further, if the Sartrean look, or something like it, is prevalent in the West today – as I will try to show by drawing on Foucault and Duden – then we can now understand our present uneasy relationship with our body and the world. Moreover, if we participate in history pre-reflectively as bodily beings, as both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre believed, then the objectification of our body and our resultant alienation may well play a major role in environmental destruction and political conflict. The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who was influenced by Sartre’s philosophy, says in The Politics of Experience: ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.’30 Laing also says that ‘[o]ur behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.’31 It would therefore not be surprising if the destruction of our experience of presence (that Sartre indicated) prompts us to behave without regard for the impact our actions have on the world and on others. Nor would it be surprising if the distance created by our body’s objectification leads us to divorce ourselves from our actions, to attribute their effects entirely to the world and to regard it as an objective, ever more threatening environment. As Laing points out, it is crucial that we ‘understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, [and] our deeds from human authorship’.32 That structure of alienation becomes comprehensible if we combine Sartre’s analysis of the look with his analysis of what he calls ‘the practico-inert’. As far as I know, Sartre never connected these.33 The reason may well be that his description of the look focuses far more on the conflict between the self and the other


205

than on the resultant alienation and loss of presence. Besides, the concept of ‘the practico-inert’ emerges in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (vol. I), which seeks to provide ‘a structural, historical anthropology’ for Marxism.34 None the less, combining the two analyses can help us understand our present situation. In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasizes that ontological freedom is absolute. However, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason he stresses that because we are all bodily beings engaged in the world, we are simultaneously free and dependent. Moreover, we make history already at the pre-reflective level, in and through our interactions with the world and each other. Like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre maintains that there is an internal logic to historical events, even though nobody may have reflected on those events at the time. The notion of ‘the practico-inert’ is an important component of these themes in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The practico-inert is ‘matter in which past praxis is embodied’.35 As Hazel Barnes explains, Sartre coined this term ‘to refer to the external world, including both the material environment and human structures . . . any “worked-over matter” which modifies my conduct by the mere fact of its being there’.36 The term ‘practico-inert’ emphasizes the resistance our projects encounter from objects that have been structured by our own and other people’s past praxis.37 In the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre argues that to satisfy our needs and desires, we human beings work on inert matter. Our work transforms that matter and (depending on the matter’s disposition) can initiate a process that strikes back at us as an alien force, or ‘counter-finality’. We fail to recognize the role played by our own actions in producing that force. By the same token, we think that history escapes us. But, as Sartre points out, ‘if History escapes me, this is not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it as well’.38 Sartre uses the example of flooding in China to illustrate how, in transforming matter, our actions can turn against us in the form of ‘monstrous’, ‘anti-human’ forces. As he describes it, given ‘the geological and hydrographic structure of China’, flooding resulted from the uprooting of trees by Chinese peasants to cultivate the soil century after century. This deforestation made the consequently unprotected soil from mountains and peneplains fill, raise and block the rivers to such an extent that they overflowed. In discussing this example Sartre says that our projects become inscribed in matter. Moreover, ‘the project that our bodies engrave in the thing . . . comes to possess an inert future, within which we shall have to determine our own future.’39 Sartre’s example illustrates our inextricable connection with the world and with other people, our freedom and dependence, and the internal logic of the history that we all make through the conjunction of our own actions with those of others. The peasants acted freely, but were none the less dependent on the land and the actions of other peasants. Their bodies literally engraved tree uprooting into the land, thereby transforming it into a practico-inert, which over time produced the disastrous floods. There was

206 Monika Langer

clearly an internal logic in this history, despite the fact that it was not evident to the peasants themselves. In Sartre’s example, the individual peasants simply wanted to acquire arable land by removing trees. For them, the trees were just obstacles – that is, objects. Sartre does not indicate how these peasants lived their body and related to each other. None the less, the example can alert us to the potentially disastrous consequences of being out of touch with our environment and each other, and ignoring the cumulative effect of our own and others’ actions. If we combine Sartre’s analyses of the look and the practico-inert, we can now understand the structure of alienation that may well play a major role in our present environmental destruction and political conflicts. As Sartre indicates, the objectification of our body by the look involves the simultaneous objectification of the world. It destroys presence and establishes a distance between ourselves and our own body, other people and the world. Sartre’s analysis of the practico-inert points out that we fail to recognize how our actions gear into those of others and shape our environment. Instead, we divorce ourselves from our bodily inscriptions in the world and perceive them as alien forces acting on us. I think that the objectification and distancing created by the look prompt us to separate ourselves from our bodily inscriptions in the world. They predispose us to deny our role in shaping our environment. Moreover, they incline us to behave destructively and to regard the effects of our actions as alien forces determining our future. Unlike Sartre, I believe that the look is not an inevitable part of human existence. Yet I think that it is now prevalent in the West and increasingly prompts us to experience our body as objective and anatomically defined. Drawing on Foucault and Duden will help us understand how this has happened. In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Foucault argues that with the formation of clinical (that is, modern) medicine, an empirical, objectifying look becomes sovereign.40 This gaze surveys bodies, gradually penetrates them and describes them in the same positivistic terms used to describe things. Through this clinical gaze and positivistic language, human beings acquire the status of objects. Thus, beginning in the eighteenth century in some countries and a little later in others, the ‘traditional opposition between the art of medicine and the knowledge of inert things’ dissolves.41 Foucault says that the advent of modern medicine brings about a radical change ‘in the fundamental structures of experience’.42 He points out that the gaze becomes dedicated to absorbing and mastering all of experience. The individual ceases to be a sick person and becomes instead an ‘endlessly reproducible pathological fact’.43 Foucault emphasizes that the new structure of objectivity involves a fundamental change in ‘the relationship between the visible and the invisible . . . revealing through the gaze and language what had previously been below and beyond their domain’.44 The literal opening up and dissection of corpses is crucial in this revelation of what was formerly interior and invisible. As the ‘a priori of [modern] medical experience’, death becomes


207

‘embodied in the living bodies of individuals’.45 In short, living bodies become objectified and anatomically defined, as if they were corpses. Foucault says that thanks to the ‘anatamo-clinical method’ and ‘the integration of death into medical thought’, human beings constitute themselves in their own eyes as objects of science.46 Moreover, the gaze that creates this objectification is not restricted to medical examinations. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and in The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction Foucault argues that this same objectifying look is used in hospitals, prisons, schools, factories and barracks.47 The look gradually pervades the entire society and becomes internalized by its members, prompting them to exercise a constant self-surveillance. In doing so, they continually objectify themselves.48 Foucault does not mention Merleau-Ponty or Sartre in his account of the formation of modern medicine. Yet his account rests on Merleau-Ponty’s insight that rather than being given, the body comes into being in dialectical interaction with the world. Further, Foucault tacitly presupposes MerleauPonty’s distinction between the lived body and the objectified body. Also, his account clearly draws on Sartre’s analysis of the look.49 Building on that analysis, Foucault stresses that far from being neutral, the medical gaze involves a deployment of power that directly penetrates the body, objectifies it and centres on it ‘as a machine’.50 How commonplace this gaze has become was brought home to me recently, when I found in a bookshop a book by medical doctor Andrew Feldman (M. D.), The Jock Doc’s Body Repair Kit, and one of its main topics is ‘Your Body’s Mechanics and its Common Malfunctions’.51 Today, we take this objectified and mechanized body for granted as an unalterable biological reality. Yet as Foucault and Duden both point out, this modern body was created as the object and result of the medical gaze.52 For most of us it is extremely difficult to let go of this anatamo-clinical conception of the body and the belief that the body is unchanging. By the same token, it is hard for us to detect and assess the impact that the gaze has on our construction and perception of our body. Duden’s ‘body history’ can be very helpful here. Duden specializes in the history and ‘sociogenesis’ of the modern body. Her research has led her to conclude that our contemporary certainties about the body are a cultural bias. Most of us think that the body has always existed as we know it today. However, Duden’s research shows that, in Germany, the modern body was constructed in the first half of the nineteenth century. In The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany Duden discusses Dr Johannes Storch’s records of over 1,800 cases of women’s ailments. They involve 1,650 different women, whom Storch treated from 1721 to 1740 in the German court city of Eisenach.53 His records give a detailed, often verbatim account of what the women said to him, as well as his conclusions and treatments. From his autobiography we know that Storch rarely performed autopsies and did not physically examine the women, because such examinations were taboo. For him, the body had no

208 Monika Langer

norm. Rather, its essence consisted of the innumerable life-stories – that is, the bio-logies – it could tell.54 Storch meticulously recorded not only these stories, but also the eyewitness testimonies of qualified observers who vouched for their truthfulness. Duden says that these stories about the women’s living bodies were more credible to Storch than ‘evidence’ uncovered in dissecting a corpse. Moreover, she adds that in around the year 1750 (when Storch published his Weiberkrankheiten [Women’s Diseases]) the stories were apparently ‘a legitimate form of “scientific” discourse about the body of women’.55 The body described in all these stories has no distinct structure, clearly demarcated organs, bones or scaffolding. It is not self-contained and closed. Duden says that this pre-modern body is open, and flows or stagnates. Its inner movements are ‘channeled through the directed orientation of its urges’. It experiences emotions corporeally in its ‘fleshly orientation’ and expresses these emotions ‘in words that carry this materiality’.56 This body is inseparable from the words in which it is spoken and from its surroundings. It cannot be mentally abstracted or objectified. Moreover, Duden points out that the Eisenach women of the eighteenth century do not have a body, but simply are. Their ailments are inseparable from themselves and their personal life-stories – that is, their biologies: bio-logies. Further, these women are ‘bound into social relations down to their innermost flesh’.57 Their body’s openness, as well as the corporeality of their emotions, words, and social relations, are evident in two examples. An altercation with her landlord makes one of these women feel anger enter her, get stuck in her innards, and require expulsion via rhubarb. Another feels her heart actually becoming heavy or breaking, when her husband is abusive.58 Duden says that in Germany a very different body begins to emerge with the formation of clinical medicine in the nineteenth century. This new body resembles the Sartrian looked-at body and the modern body described by Foucault. Its emotions become disembodied as it is objectified, isolated and anatomized into an assembly of organs and physiological functions. In Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn Duden describes how ultrasound scanning subsequently transforms the body’s invisible interior into an external image considered more real.59 Initially used only for potentially problematic cases, it soon becomes mandatory for all pregnancies. Today, many additional technologies similarly induce us – women and men – continually to objectify and monitor ourselves. We saw earlier that such objectification results in profound alienation from ourselves, other people and the world. Given the interconnection between body and world described in the works of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault and Duden, there does indeed seem to be an intrinsic relationship between our modern body and our environmental crisis. I concur with Duden’s suggestion that we say ‘no’ to objectification, and start putting ourselves back into our own flesh.60 By doing so, we can begin to bring about a positive change in our present environmental situation.


209

Saying ‘no’ to objectification does not mean returning to a pre-modern age. Nor is saying ‘no’ simply a matter of reflection or will. Duden says that we need to trust our own senses and stop disempowering ourselves by deferring excessively to experts. Yet saying ‘no’ to objectification is more difficult than she implies. As Sartre points out in his analysis of the look, objectification is experienced at the pre-reflective level. There is always a gap between pre-reflective experience and reflection. Moreover, our past is inscribed in our body and cannot simply be erased. However, we can gradually transform our bodily being through experiences that are more positive, once we have become cognisant of the destructive effects of objectification. It is important to note here that although this chapter has concentrated on an alienating and disempowering type of objectification, there is also a kind of objectification that is empowering and life-enhancing. For example, athletes and their coaches may objectify the athlete’s body to improve his or her athletic performance, thereby increasing the athlete’s self-esteem and enjoyment of the sport. A further example of a positive type of objectification emerges from Kirsti Inkeri Kuosa’s interviews with three women, who had been living with multiple sclerosis for over 20 years. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, progressive illness that has an uncertain prognosis, affects the central nervous system and causes various bodily impairments. Kuosa reported what the women told her, as well as her own conclusions, in a paper she presented at the ‘Environment, Embodiment and Gender’ conference (University of Bergen, 31 October 2008). Kuosa stated that especially after each attack of their illness, these women found it very beneficial to thematize their body. She pointed out that the women’s objectification of their own body became obvious to her through their way of speaking about their body. This objectification enabled them to determine how their body presently functioned, what its abilities and constraints now were, and what activities they now could and could not do. The women were thus able to re-establish a measure of predictability in their daily lives. This allowed them to set priorities and use their abilities to maximum advantage, leaving them freer to plan and concentrate on enjoyable activities. The women told Kuosa that they felt they had become experts in knowing how their body functioned and in living with multiple sclerosis. They felt they were in the best position to decide what was best for them. Clearly, these women empowered themselves and enhanced their lives by objectifying their body. Interestingly enough, Kuosa reported that these women living with multiple sclerosis also experienced a disempowering objectification through the gaze of other people and felt they had to protect themselves from what others thought about them. The women told her that other people were inclined to see only their illness and tended to categorize them as ‘sick and disabled’. Some even assumed (wrongly) that their physical disability indicated a concomitant intellectual impairment. These women’s accounts of living with multiple sclerosis thus clarify the difference between an objectification that

210 Monika Langer

is beneficial and empowering, and one that is destructive and disempowering. It is of course only the latter type of objectification that we must address, if we are to bring about a positive transformation in our bodily being and our world.

Notes 1. I presented an earlier version of this chapter as a keynote speaker at the ‘Environment, Embodiment and Gender’ conference, University of Bergen, Norway, 30 October 2008. 2. Merleau-Ponty 1973, 2003: 70, 208, 216, 228, 280; Langer 1989: 102–6, 130, 152–3, 166; Sartre 1981: 43. 3. Sartre 1981: 29. 4. See Foucault 1996b: 51–6; 1996a: 59–60; 1996c: 350, 351, 354–5; 1980b: 117; 1991: 45–9; ‘Foreword’ to the English edition of Foucault 1973: xiv; and 1976: 3–17 (‘Introduction’) and 199–211 (‘Conclusion’). 5. Foucault 1988: 156. 6. Foucault 1996c: 359. 7. Foucault 1980a: 151–2. 8. Foucault 1980a: 151, 139. 9. Duden 1991a: 9. 10. Merleau-Ponty 2003: 214. 11. Merleau-Ponty 1967: 125, 219. 12. Merleau-Ponty 1963: 55, 56; original French 64, 65. I have corrected the English translation to accord with the French text. 13. See, for instance, BN 378–9, 422: ‘the necessity of existing as an engaged, contingent being among other contingent beings. . . . the body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the world is the total situation of the for-itself and the measure of its existence’; and ‘[t]he body is the totality of meaningful relations to the world’. 14. BN 597. 15. BN 525. Sartre also says that unity with the other is ‘unrealizable’ both in fact and in theory. He insists that: ‘I am – at the very root of my being – the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other’, ‘[t]he being-for-others precedes and founds the being-with-others’, ‘[c]onflict is the original meaning of being-forothers’, and ‘my project of recovering my being can be realized only if I get hold of this freedom and reduce it to being a freedom subject to my freedom’(BN 444, 507, 445, 447). 16. Sartre says that the look is the ‘fundamental connection which must form the basis of any theory concerning the Other’, and that ‘the being-in-the-act-oflooking and the being-looked-at . . . constitute the fundamental relations of the For-itself with the Other’ (BN 315, 507). 17. BN 339–40. 18. As Katherine Morris has pointed out, Sartre’s use of the word ‘object’ is problematic. The other as centre of his own perceptive/instrumental fields differs fundamentally from a mere ‘in-itself’ kind of object, insofar as he is a transcendence. Yet the look is also operative here and this other is still a transcendencetranscended. None the less, there is always an awareness (even as one is in the process of objectifying him) that the other is not in fact a mere ‘in-itself’/thing. As Sartre says, ‘if we consider that the body is a transcended-transcendence, then


19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

211

the perception of it can not [i.e. cannot] by nature be of the same type as that of inanimate objects’ (BN 425). BN 331–2; see also 315, 317–23. BN 333. In a footnote on the last page of the section ‘The “Faith” of Bad Faith’, Sartre indicates the possibility that we can ‘radically escape bad faith’ by ‘a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted’. He adds that we [i.e. he] shall call this self-recovery “authenticity”, but that its description ‘has no place here’ (BN 86). Similarly, in a footnote at the end of the section ‘Second Attitude Toward Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism’, Sartre says that ‘the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation’ is not excluded, but ‘can be achieved only after a radical conversion which we [i.e. he] can not [i.e. cannot] discuss here’ (BN 504). Further, in the section ‘Freedom and Responsibility’ Sartre tells us what ‘good faith’ or ‘authenticity’ means, and adds that ‘most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith’ (BN 681). In the section ‘Ethical Implications’ he contrasts bad and good faith and asks (doubtless rhetorically) if one can live in anguish and what the implications would be (BN 767–8). All this might lead one to think that, in Sartre’s view, conflict is not inevitable. Yet there are several places in the text that seem to contradict what Sartre says about authenticity and salvation in the aforementioned passages. Moreover, authenticity in Sartre’s sense seems to require reflection, whereas the look (and its response) operates already at the pre-reflective level of experience. Given the gap between the reflective and pre-reflective levels, it seems to me that authenticity can at best be only momentary or intermittent. Further, Sartre’s conception of consciousness and of freedom arguably precludes genuinely positive interpersonal relations. These are all complex issues, but a fuller consideration of them exceeds the scope of this chapter. Merleau-Ponty 2003: 280. See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty 2003: 273, 277. Merleau-Ponty 1969: 187–8. Merleau-Ponty 1969: 187. Merleau-Ponty 1969: 187, 109. Merleau-Ponty 1969: 186. Merleau-Ponty 1969: 110. BN 330. Sartre also says: ‘the alienation of myself which is the being-looked-at involves the alienation of the world which I organize’ (BN 323). I have corrected the English translation to better reflect the French text (EN 321–2). Laing 1967: 12. Laing 1967: 24. Similarly, he says: ‘as we experience the world, so we act’ (26). Laing 1967: 66. In his Critique (2004) Sartre does say that ‘man is the being by whom becomingan-object comes to man’. He says that in the perceptual field, my objective being as an intellectual exists for the manual workers who consider me as such, but it escapes me. By the same token, the workers’ material environment as the means for their activity escapes me. Thus I discover ‘an objectivity-for-the-other’. Sartre goes on to explain that, none the less, a kind of unification and reciprocity is established through praxis. He also speaks of alienation as a mediated relation to the objects of labour and to other people. However, it seems to me that this analysis does not capture the essential features of the Sartrean look presented in BN. Moreover, Sartre contends in the Critique (unlike in BN) that all conflicts are conditioned by scarcity. See Sartre 1968: 174; 2004: 67 (original French 183–9). Sartre 2004: 822.

212 Monika Langer 35. Sartre 2004: 829. 36. Sartre 1968: 173 n. 6. 37. See Gutting 2001: 152 (paraphrased). Sartre says that the field of the practicoinert is always conditioned by scarcity, which arises from physical necessity, inequitable distribution of goods, or other factors. He maintains that need, scarcity, and conflict are interdependent and ineradicable. 38. Sartre 1968: 88. 39. Sartre 1965: 452. See also Sartre 2004: 161–5, 225–7; original French: 224–5, 231– 3, 245–6. 40. Foucault 1975: xiii. 41. Foucault 1975: xiii, xiv, 97. 42. Foucault 1975: 199. 43. Foucault 1975: xiv, p. 97. Foucault also notes that seeing and saying were inseparable before the advent of clinical medicine (ibid.). 44. Foucault 1975: xii. Although unacknowledged, Merleau-Ponty’s influence is detectable here. Merleau-Ponty says that ‘there is an interiority of the body, an ‘other side’, invisible for us, of this visible’ (2003: 218). 45. Foucault 1975: 196. 46. Foucault 1975: 196, 197. Foucault also says that ‘disease becomes . . . open without remainder to the sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze’ (ibid., 196). 47. Foucault 1979: 170–228; and 1980a: 32–3, 59–64, 135–45. 48. See Foucault 1979: 207–9, 218–28. Sandra Lee Bartky argues that in patriarchal society there is a significant difference between men’s and women’s perception and construction of their bodies. As she points out, in contemporary society women live their bodies as seen by an anonymous, panoptical male Other, who prompts them to construct a docile, feminine body. See Bartky 1988: 61–86. 49. Foucault also draws on Sartre’s critique of anatomy and physiology. Sartre says that there is ‘an enormous error in believing that the Other’s body, which is originally revealed to us, is the body of anatomical-physiology’ (BN 427). See also BN 423–7 regarding what Sartre says about life, death, a corpse, anatomy and physiology. 50. Foucault 1979: 195; 1980a: 139, 151. As Johanna Oksala (2004: 102) has pointed out, Foucault’s work does not provide either a theory or a unified account of the body. Consequently, Foucault’s conception of the body must be gleaned from his various writings and interviews. For a discussion of the relationship between Sartre and Foucault, and a comparison of their philosophies (including their analyses of the look), see, for instance, Ciccariello-Maher 2006; Levy 2001; Crossley 1993. 51. Feldman 1999. 52. See Foucault 1975: 195–6; Duden 1991b: 3, 4. A more accurate translation of the original German title of Duden’s book would be History Beneath the Skin. . . . The English translation of this book has a number of errors, including the omission of several phrases. 53. Duden 1991b: 66, vii, 182, 1, 2, 3, 4. Intended to instruct his junior colleagues, Dr. Storch’s Weiberkrankheiten has seven hefty volumes of case studies (ibid.,v, 65, 66). 54. Duden 1991b 51, v–vi, 83–5, 68; and Duden 1991a: 5–6. 55. Duden 1991b: 68–70. Duden remarks (70) that Storch carefully provided details corroborating the truthfulness of each story, such as the medical qualifications of the report’s author ‘(no mere empiricist, no teller of fairy-tales), the place of the observation’, the patient’s social status, and so on.


213

56. Duden 1991b: 124, 126; 1991a: 1-6. Duden says that the pre-modern body’s fluids can change into milk, blood, excrement, sweat, impure matter, and so on. These can accumulate and be expelled in ways that our modern conception precludes as anatomically and physiologically impossible. For instance, Storch recorded that ‘pure milk’ flowed from an incision made for bleeding. Duden also notes that the body described in Storch’s records differs from the body experienced and perceived in the late Middle Ages. The latter ‘exuded exuberantly, broke all bounds, overflowed, and swept others along in its celebration of life’. By contrast, the Eisenach women experienced their bodies as cramped up, although they were supposed to flow. Duden comments that ‘[t]he agony of experiencing an objectified body had begun’. See Duden 1991b: 178. 57. Duden 1991a: 2, 5; 1991b: 145, 157. 58. Duden 1991a: 2–4. See also Duden 1991b: 142–52, 162. 59. Duden 1993. 60. Duden 1991a: 9, 6. Duden’s suggestion is implicit in her response to a question and a comment from David Cayley. To his question ‘Is there any way out, in your opinion?’ Duden replies, ‘the only way out is to say no . . . and argue from one’s own senses’ (9). She also says: ‘I really learned something from these women about, say, trying to put myself back into my own flesh’ (6).

References Bartky, S. L. (1988). ‘Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power’. In I. Diamond and L Quinby, eds. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 61–86. Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2006). ‘The internal limits of the European gaze: intellectuals and the colonial difference’. Radical Philosophy Review, 9, 2: 139–65. Crossley, N. (1993). ‘The politics of the gaze: between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty’. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 16, 4: 399–419. Duden, B. (1991a). ‘History beneath the skin’. Interview with David Cayley, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Ideas’ transcripts. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1–20. Duden, B. (1991b). The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in EighteenthCentury Germany. Tr. Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duden, B. (1993). Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Tr. Lee Hoinacki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feldman, A. (1999). The Jock Doc’s Body Repair Kit. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1975). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1976). The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper & Row. ‘Introduction’ (3–17) and ‘Conclusion’ (199–211). Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980a). The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, Tr. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980b). ‘Truth and power’. In Colin Gordon, ed. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 109–33.

214 Monika Langer Foucault, M. (1988). ‘Is it really important to think?’/’Practicing criticism’. In Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. M. Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. New York: Routledge, 152–6. Foucault, M. (1991). ‘The subject, knowledge, and the “history of truth” ’. In Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Tr. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 43–82. Foucault, M. (1996a–c). a: ‘The archeology of knowledge’ (51–6), b: ‘Foucault responds to Sartre’ (57–64) and c: ‘How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth?’ (348–62). In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trs. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). Gutting, G. (2001). French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuosa, K. I. (2008). ‘Thematizing the body: embodied self and identity of women living with multiple sclerosis’. Paper presented at the ‘Environment, Embodiment and Gender’ conference, University of Bergen, Norway, 31 October. Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Langer, M. M. (1989) Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide and Commentary. London: Macmillan/Tallahasee: The Florida State University Press. Levy, N. (2001). Being Up-To-Date: Foucault, Sartre, and Postmodernity. New York: Peter Lang. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Tr. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original French publication, 1945). Abbreviated as PP in this chapter. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). In Praise of Philosophy. Trs. John Wild and James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (Original French publication: Éloge de la philosophie et autres essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1967). The Structure of Behavior. Tr. Alden L. Fisher. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969). Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Tr. John O’Neill. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). ‘Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’. In Adventures of the Dialectic. Tr. Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 95–201. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003). Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled with notes by Dominique Séglard, ed. Anthony J. Steinbock and John McCumber, tr. Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Oksala, J. (2004). ‘Anarchic bodies: Foucault and the feminist question of experience’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 19, 4: 97–119. Sartre, J-P. (1943). L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Abbreviated as EN in this chapter. Sartre, J-P. (1965). The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ed. Robert Denoon Cumming. New York: Vintage Books. Sartre, J-P. (1966). Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. (Original French publication, 1943.) Abbreviated as BN in this chapter. Sartre, J-P. (1968). Search for a Method. Tr. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Vintage Books. Sartre, J-P. (1981). ‘An interview with Jean-Paul Sartre’. In The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Sartre, J-P. (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. I. Tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Rée. London: Verso. (Original French publication: Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome I. Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

13 Body, Technique and Reflexivity: Sartre in Sociological Perspective Nick Crossley

‘The body’ has become a central focus of both theory and research within sociology over the last twenty years. The lines of inquiry that have emerged are diverse, but engagement with key philosophical discussions of embodiment, including those of Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche and Foucault, have been prominent. Sartre has been largely ignored in this context, however, as he often is, even in more philosophically informed branches of sociology (though see Craib 1976; Tiryakian 1979; Hayim 1996). When his work is cited it is often to criticize both his individualism and what most sociologists take to be his implausibly extreme claims regarding human freedom. The work of Pierre Bourdieu, a leading figure of late twentieth-century sociology, who is discussed below, is exemplary of this. Bourdieu typically formulates his approach as a ‘middle way’ between deterministic approaches on the one side, and the claims to absolute freedom that he associates with Sartre on the other (for instance, Bourdieu 1992a, 2000). Such interpretations and criticisms of Sartre, whether justifiable or not, are not the sole preserve of sociologists. Even some of those close to him were critical for similar reasons. Merleau-Ponty (PP and 1968), for example, was openly critical of the analysis of freedom in and the individualistic framing of Being and Nothingness. And de Beauvoir (1961, 1967) introduced subtle but decisive modifications in her appropriation of the book, which tempered these tendencies (for a concise summary, see Kruks 1990). Indeed, even Sartre identified a need to revise his view in his later work, though the extent of his revision remains open to question (Sartre 2004). Close attention to Sartre’s reflections on embodiment in Being and Nothingness reveals a more sociological dimension to his thought than is commonly acknowledged, however. Our embodiment is central to our social being for Sartre. It renders us visible, tangible and audible, such that we exist for others. And their existence for us consists, in the first instance, in an embodied, sensuous awareness. Our embodiment simultaneously facilitates our existence for the other and theirs for us, and this corporeal interchange is the basis of social life. Beyond this, moreover, both in the chapter of Being and 215

216 Nick Crossley

Nothingness devoted to ‘The Body’ and a later section on ‘My Fellowman’, Sartre shows that human action embodies culture, suggesting a degree of social inherence that many of his critics have called for, but failed to identify in his work. In this chapter I seek to explore this sociological aspect of Being and Nothingness, using it both to refute oversimplified sociological critiques of Sartre and also to problematize his position. Sartre is more attuned to the social nature of our embodiment than his sociological critics are inclined to admit, in my view, but this introduces a tension to his work. The radical conception of freedom for which Being and Nothingness is best known must be reconciled with what might be conceived to be the constraints of socio-cultural inherence. At times Sartre seems to recognize this, but his attempts to deal with it are question-begging and call for more theoretical refinement than he offers. This chapter focuses on two key sociological concepts, both of which find a strong echo in Being and Nothingness: reflexive embodiment and body techniques. I begin by showing how and where these two concepts figure in Sartre, drawing out their sociological significance and indicating why they defy the claims of certain of his critics. I next consider the tension in Sartre’s work between the concept of body techniques in particular and his claims regarding human freedom, demonstrating that Sartre himself recognized this tension but questioning his claim to have resolved it. I conclude with a brief reflection on projects of personal change, which invokes the notion of reflexive embodiment and, in effect, ties up the discussion.

Sartre’s bodies In the chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness, Sartre outlines three ontological dimensions of embodiment. First, the body is lived: it is the embodiment of free consciousness. As such it is the locus of our perception and action, but it is neither perceived nor acted on by us. It is not an object. Thus Sartre argues that our body is our ‘point of view’ on the world, the central and necessary locus around which our perceptions are structured. But in contrast to other viewpoints, such as a cliff top, our body is a point of view on which we can have no point of view. We cannot step back from our body as we can from a cliff top in order to view it. Similarly, in relation to action, our body is an instrument we use to manipulate both the world and instruments and tools. But it differs from other instruments and tools in that we need no other instrument or tool in order to use it. I must grasp a hammer and manipulate it in order to use it, but use of my hand involves no such preparation or manipulation. I do not do anything in order to use my hand. It is interesting that Sartre refers to the body as an instrument in this context. The imagery overlaps with that of the sociologist Marcel Mauss (1979). Mauss is interested in the different ways, across cultures and through history,

Sartre in Sociological Perspective

217

human beings ‘use’ and ‘know how to use their bodies’ (1979: 97). He argues that ‘[t]he body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body’ (Mauss 1979: 104). It is awkward imagery, however, given Sartre’s argument. ‘Instrument’ and ‘use’ suggest a separation of consciousness and the body which allows the former to manipulate the latter, when Sartre is explicitly challenging any such notion. The lived body is embodied consciousness for Sartre. It is an embodied awareness of, involvement in and perspective on the world. This conception of embodiment anticipates much of Merleau-Ponty’s work on the lived body in PP and also the theme of ‘bodily absence’ which Drew Leder (1990) explores with respect to both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Our experience is irreducibly embodied, according to Leder, but we do not ordinarily experience our bodies in an immediate manner. Our embodied consciousness intends the world beyond us. It gives us a world and projects us into that world. But it remains a blind spot or vanishing point, the background against which the world can be foregrounded. Moreover, like Merleau-Ponty, but perhaps more centrally, Sartre also identifies this lived aspect of embodiment with facticity. My body is the form of my being there, in a particular location at a particular time. It is the source of my lived sense of my own mortality, vulnerability and subjection to the forces of the external world. The second aspect of the body Sartre refers to is the body-for-others; that is, my body as it is perceived and acted on by others, or perhaps the body of the other as I perceive and act on it. There are arguably many versions of this body-for-others, from the physiological machine constituted within the medical gaze to the artist’s model. Sartre’s main concern, however, is with the body of the other as a situated, meaningful object within one’s perceptual field. For Sartre, the body-for-others is the basis for much of our thought about ‘the body’ in general. When we think of ‘the body’ we think of an object perceived and/or manipulated from the outside. Indeed, even when we think of ‘the inside’ of the body we often resort to anatomy or physiology and thus to the perspective of the external scientific researcher or surgeon. It is this contrast between the lived body and the body-for-others, he argues, which manifests within mind/body dualism. And the intractability of dualism stems from this. The concept of mind articulates the insider perspective of the lived body (embodied consciousness), whilst the concept of the body articulates the external perspective of the body-for-others. The two cannot be grafted together in a unified conception of ‘the person’ because they are not different ‘parts’ of a whole but rather, as Gilbert Ryle (1949) also argued, different vantage points on human being. The third aspect of embodiment concerns my own knowledge and experience of ‘my body’ as reflected back to me via the other. Because I experience

218 Nick Crossley

the other as a being who experiences me, I can experience myself (‘my body’) as experienced by the other. My experience of my body is, in this sense, alienated. I experience myself as existing for the other. This may be a matter of my being-perceived by a specific other, as many of Sartre’s best-known examples of ‘the look’ illustrate. I become aware of my body by way of my awareness that another is perceiving it, by way of a feeling of being captured within the perceptual field of another who, furthermore, is intruding on my own perceptual field. Sartre also describes a more general modality of the experience of my body as other, however, and claims that ‘it is language which teaches me my body’s structures for the Other’ (BN 354). Through interaction with others in a specific cultural milieu I acquire ways of speaking about and thus experiencing my body from another point of view. Sartre calls this other viewpoint the Other’s viewpoint but it is evident that what he means here is akin to what the pragmatist philosopher G. H. Mead (1967) refers to as the ‘generalized other’; that is, a specific community whose language and culture betray a distinctive point of view. By learning to talk about the body in different (scientific, moral, aesthetic) registers I learn to perceive and scrutinize my own body from a variety of perspectives. It becomes an ‘it’ for me, a biological, moral or aesthetic object.

Reflexive embodiment This third ontological dimension of the body overlaps with recent sociological theories of embodiment. Much of the sociology of the body has focused on what I have called ‘reflexive embodiment’ (see Crossley 2001, 2006); that is, the fact that we both ‘are’ bodies and also ‘have’ bodies. I am embodied consciousness for Sartre, but contact with the other causes me also to ‘have’ a body; that is, to experience my body as a possession, albeit one the other threatens to take from me. Paradoxically, the alienation of my body in the experience of the other makes my own body available to me as an object on which I make claims to ownership. More importantly, Sartre has a relatively ‘sociological’ conception of this insofar as he claims that our reflexive experience of our bodies is mediated through the perspective of the other; indeed, the generalized other. Reflexivity for Sartre is something we achieve by living in a community, interacting with others, experiencing ourselves from their point of view and learning to perceive and speak of our bodies in culturally specific (medical, moral, aesthetic, and so on) ways. Sociological work on reflexive embodiment has tended to focus on the recent emergence and growth in uptake of a range of practices of bodily modification and maintenance. Individuals in contemporary societies, it is argued, increasingly perceive their bodies or body parts (nose, hair, breasts, waistline) as objects to work on by way of diet, exercise, cosmetics, adornments, surgery, and so on. The body has ceased to be an immutable


219

background factor in our lives and has become, as Giddens (1991) puts it, ‘a project’. Although Sartre’s work arguably pre-dates the cultural shifts on which this work is focused and does not address the issue of modification, his reflections on the process whereby individuals come to experience their bodies as objects via the other constitutes a basis on which the issue could be addressed. One could imagine a Sartrean analysis of the role of bodily modification in the interplay of self–other relations. Furthermore, his reflections on the role of language in giving us an outside perspective on our bodies could afford him a purchase on the role of culture in ‘body projects’. My body, for Sartre as for most sociologists, exists for me as an object to be worked on because that is how it is collectively constituted within the circles in which I mix, that is, by the ‘generalized other’ or ‘Other’. In these respects Sartre departs from the caricature of his work that tends to prevail in the sociological literature and appears to qualify two of the claims that sociologists generally deem problematic. First, his stress on freedom is qualified by recognition that the perceptions which inform human action are culturally framed and shaped. The individual comprehends her own embodiment through the categories of a shared language, that is to say, by way of social categories. She perceives the world, or at least her own physical presence in that world, in terms common to her society, and this informs her actions. Thus, the decision to have cosmetic surgery or a tattoo does not emerge in a vacuum (nothingness) but is rather shaped, in some part, by a cultural context in which the body is increasingly perceived as a ‘project’ to be worked on and used to make a personal identity statement; a context in which, as the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991: 8) puts it, the body has become ‘a phenomenon of choices and options’. And of course it may be informed by the (conflicting) dynamics of self–other relations in which any particular individual finds herself, with self altering her body in an attempt to affects others’ experience of her. Similarly, decisions regarding diet, exercise and healthy living must be seen in light of a proliferation of discourses about the body which identify its vulnerability and calculate the risks attached to variations in its (mis)treatment (Giddens 1991). In an interestingly Sartrean vein, Giddens argues that individuals in what he calls ‘late modern societies’ are ‘condemned’ by the sheer proliferation of information and advice to make informed food choices, such that ‘we are all on a diet’. We might choose to ignore what the experts tell us, but we cannot choose not to choose, acting according to tradition as our ancestors did, because the reflexive discourses of the contemporary age have problematized food and eating (among other things), forcing the choice on us. Sartre might disagree on the details but his notion that our relation to our own bodies is mediated through the discourse of the other is in basic accord with such sociological claims. If our experience of our bodies is mediated by that of the Other and the Other constitutes the body as a locus of risks, then risk is a fact of our reflexive embodiment and

220 Nick Crossley

we must contend with it (even if only by rejecting the advice of experts and resolving to stick with the deep-fried Mars bars). Secondly, Sartre’s individualism is qualified in the respect that language is, and is recognized by Sartre to be, a social or cultural structure. The categories which lend the body meaning are social categories, and every time the individual mobilizes those categories they participate within the collective life of their society, both drawing from and contributing to it. Their thought is shaped by language and they perpetuate (and perhaps modify) that language, passing it on to others. Importantly, this also means that individuals’ experience of their bodies is, to a degree, a function of their situation within society and history. Specifically, the emergence at different historical conjunctures of new discourses on the body will affect individuals’ own reflexive relations to their bodies. The ‘freedom’ for which Sartre is (in)famous does not resist social (or at least linguistic-cultural) structures, but is rather channelled through the framework they provide. Sartre may not have pursued such sociological avenues, but they follow from his claims and constitute legitimate sociological extensions of his work.

Body techniques This social-cultural dimension resurfaces in another form later in Being and Nothingness, again in a discussion of the body or rather of skiing and related physical activities: to be a Savoyard is not simply to inhabit the high valleys of Savoy; it is, amongst other things, to ski in the winters, to use the ski as a mode of transportation. And precisely, it is to ski according to the French method, not that of Arlberg or of Norway. But since the mountain and the snowy slopes are apprehended only through a technique, this is precisely to discover the French meaning of ski slopes. (BN 513) This passage answers, in some part, a question that Sartre had raised earlier in the section from which it is taken; namely, how ‘instrumental-complexes can have a meaning which my free project has not first given to them’ (BN 509). The ski slopes have a meaning for the Savoyard, which is not reducible to her qua individual consciousness, because her experience of them is mediated by a technique of skiing which she has acquired from her community. Her way of ‘using her body’ is not strictly hers as an individual, but rather derives from the life and shared history of her social group. And the example is, of course, intended to demonstrate a more general point. Societies or cultures involve numerous such techniques, including forms of speech and


221

language. And these techniques form a routine and largely unnoticed basis of everyday action and experience. This observation and argument overlap with the sociological conception of ‘body techniques’ first discussed by Mauss (1979) in 1934, and later elaborated by Bourdieu (1984, 1992a). Both show, with varying degrees of empirical sophistication and rigour, how ‘uses of the body’ vary across societies and social groups. This variation, they argue, demonstrates that the body is, in some part, a tool and thus belongs to the cultural domain. Its uses are shaped in the context of social life and vary across collectives. The body is not, as might otherwise be believed, reducible to its biological substrate. It is not an immutable given which structures social life from outside or ‘beneath’. Some body techniques are unique to particular societies. They have no equivalent in others. Mauss claimed to know of societies where spitting, as a means of clearing the throat, is unheard of, for example. And, of course, many of the traditional hunting techniques once common in European societies are now long forgotten. Other techniques are found in all or most societies but vary across societies in the way in which they are performed. Indeed, variations might be found within national societies: across genders, social classes, generations and geographical regions. Minute and largely invisible variations in the use of the mouth and tongue in speech generate very clear regional accents in the UK, for example, which allow native speakers to locate the geographical origins of their interlocutors, sometimes quite precisely. And this is further modified according to class, with the middleclass members of all regions more closely approximating a standardized ‘Queen’s English’. More widely, Mauss identifies social variations in ways of walking, sleeping, eating, dancing and making love, to name only a few. Mauss’s interest in this topic is twofold. First, as a disciple (indeed nephew) of one of sociology’s founders, Émile Durkheim, he was seeking, like Durkheim, to establish an autonomous domain of investigation for sociology. Whilst conceding that body techniques are shaped by both biological and psychological factors, his focus on social variation in body techniques suggests a need for sociological explanation. If body techniques vary across societies, then social life plays some part in shaping them and the science of society has a legitimate object of investigation. Body techniques are not just patterns of physical movement, however. Mauss’s second key point is that they embody practical reason. They are collective solutions to the exigencies and problems of life and embody a particular understanding of the world. He uses the concept of the habitus to tie this to a philosophical, and more specifically Aristotelian, conception of practical reason: I have had this notion of the social nature of ‘the habitus’ for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word – it should be understood in

222 Nick Crossley

France – habitus. The word translates infinitely better than ‘habitude’ (habit or custom), the ‘exis’ [or hexis], the ‘acquired ability’ and ‘faculty’ of Aristotle. . . . These ‘habits’ do not vary just with individuals and their imitations; they vary between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties. (Mauss 1979: 101) The habitus concept is also used by Bourdieu. Indeed, it is very closely identified with his work in sociology, as he develops and uses it extensively. Interestingly, however, when focusing specifically on stylized and variable uses of the body he tends to revert to the Greek hexis (he also occasionally uses ‘body techniques’). Bourdieu shares Mauss’s concern with both social variation in body techniques, particularly intra-societal variation between classes and genders, and practical reason. But he makes two further observations. First, he maintains that body techniques embody a particular attitude toward or manner of being-in-the-world. Secondly, he maintains that body techniques embody symbolic value. His examples are often over-generalized and contentious, to say the least, but they are interesting all the same. He famously dissects the male way of eating, for example: fish has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the masculine way of eating, that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently, with the front of the mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of the bones). The whole masculine identity – what is called virility – is involved in these two ways of eating; nibbling and picking, as befits a woman, or with wholehearted male gulps and mouthfuls, just as it is involved in the two (perfectly homologous) ways of talking, with the front of the mouth or the whole of the mouth. (Bourdieu 1984: 190) As noted in the quotation, this variation in eating, on Bourdieu’s reckoning, corresponds to a broader variation in use of the mouth during speech. Specifically, he claims that the bourgeoisie speak in a ‘tight-lipped’ manner, at the front of their mouth, whilst the proletariat speak in a more ‘slack-mouthed’ manner, using the whole of their mouth. This difference, he suggests, reflects differences in their respective modes of being-in-the-world. The bourgeois approach to life is, by comparison to the proletariat, ‘uptight’: Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s wholly socially informed relation to


223

the world, are expressed. . . . The most frequent articulatory position is an element in an overall way of using the mouth (in talking but also in eating, drinking, laughing etc.) . . . in the case of the lower classes, articulatory style is quite clearly part of a relation to the body that is dominated by the refusal of ‘airs and graces’ . . . Bourgeois dispositions convey in their physical postures of tension and exertion . . . the bodily indices of quite general dispositions towards the world and other people, such as haughtiness and disdain. (Bourdieu 1992b: 86–7) The symbolic dimension is drawn out in a discussion of the masculine mode of walking: The manly man, who goes straight to his target, without detours, is also a man who refuses twisted and devious looks, words, gestures and blows. He stands up straight and looks straight into the face of the person he approaches or wishes to welcome . . . Bodily hexis is political mythology realised, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking and thereby of feeling and thinking. (Bourdieu 1992a: 70) Women are caught in a double bind by this political mythology. If they adopt the ‘straight’ posture and approach of the man, they deviate from typical expectations regarding feminine behaviour and may be subject to ridicule or other sanctions. However, typical feminine comportment does not connote the value of honesty and integrity that may be demanded in certain social encounters. Some of what Bourdieu says here overlaps with Iris Young’s (1980) important feminist critique of both Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on embodiment. Young’s critique adds further insights too, moreover. Feminine ‘body techniques’ (not a term she uses) are not only different from masculine techniques, she argues, but also less efficient and effective. They are therefore relatively debilitating. Women typically minimize their movement, localizing it in discrete body parts, according to Young, such that they lose the advantage of both strength and balance afforded by the masculine tendency to throw the whole body behind a movement: for instance, women lift with their arms, but fail to put their back and legs into it, thereby failing to mobilize the additional and greater strength of these muscle groups. Likewise, they are prone to reactivity and passivity in interaction with objects: when catching a ball, for example, they tend to remain static, waiting for the ball to hit them rather than moving towards it, and consequently lose the advantage and power such movement affords. These observations may be somewhat dated (Young 1998) and insufficiently sensitive to context – men, as Grimshaw (1991) notes, can become clumsy and inhibited in

224 Nick Crossley

such contexts as an aerobics class – but the basic patterns no doubt still exist, as do their causes: namely, cultural constructions of femininity and women’s need to circumvent unwanted male contact and voyeurism. Feminine comportment, Young argues, involves a proleptic defence against such intrusions which inhibits action. And this inhibition is further amplified by the increase in self-consciousness also involved. Women are not as much at ease in their bodies as men in most situations. The unwanted attention of men forces them to become aware of their bodies and this renders their comportment awkward. Sartre might not have agreed with all the various reflections of Mauss, Bourdieu and Young, but their claims only elaborate on observations regarding differences in uses of the body which he himself made in his reflections on the skiing technique of the Savoyard. As such they are compatible with his position. This challenges the usual sociological critique of Sartre. Through the concept of technique he demonstrates an awareness and acceptance of social inherence. The Savoyard skis in a French way and consequently experiences the snow and the slopes in a French way. Their experience of and action within the world are shaped indirectly by their belonging to a particular social group. Sartre’s example is national or regional belonging, but it could have been class or gender. Indeed, some of his examples do involve class. His point is simply that experience is mediated by techniques which are specific to social groups. Which groups and techniques is assumedly a matter for empirical investigation. Insofar as gender is one such group, moreover, this suggests that there may be less (philosophical) distance between Sartre and his feminist critics than is sometimes suggested.

Technique, culture and freedom There is a sticking point to all of this, however. The notion that the Savoyard skis in a distinctly French way and thus experiences the slopes in a distinctly French way might seem to compromise Sartre’s (in)famous celebration of human freedom. Sartre anticipates this claim and sets out a response to it. His argument is that techniques do not exist independently of their use and the skill of those who use them. The French technique of skiing, for example, is not a thing external to action. It is re-created or brought (back) into existence on every occasion that a Savoyard takes to the slopes. And it can only be brought back into existence on account of the skill of the Savoyard. It follows that the technique cannot be said to cause action or otherwise influence it. It is a consequence of action rather than a cause. Techniques are taken up and used in free actions. Moreover, because techniques exist only in use by free, embodied consciousnesses, they actually presuppose freedom. Far from compromising freedom, techniques exist only in virtue of it.


225

It is only from the outside, Sartre continues, that the action of the Savoyard appears restricted. She is not aware that she is using a technique. Indeed, in some respects the technique only exists from the point of view of the external observer who spots a similarity between Savoyard skiers which distinguishes them from others. This is an important argument but it is not sufficient. Sartre is right to say that techniques do not act on the individual as, for example, one billiard ball acts on another. And insofar as our model of causality requires interference from an external force or agent, Sartre is right to resist the implication of determinism. However, the fact that the Savoyard skis in a peculiarly French way does, as Mauss’s work suggests, point to some external influence. They have been influenced by their peers. This influence is only indirectly related to any particular instance of skiing. They ski in a French manner in the present because they have learned to do so in the past. The influence is still there, however, and the indirect nature of the influence introduces another factor into the equation: disposition or habitus. The Savoyard is disposed to ski in a particular way in virtue of his past experience. This certainly involves skill, as Sartre indicates, but it is an acquired skill whose mobilization operates independently of conscious reflection or choice. As noted above, Sartre himself indicates that techniques are mobilized without conscious awareness by the actor. Furthermore, Sartre even seems sometimes to imply a social shaping of motivation. The Savoyard skis because she needs to move across the snow, of course, but Sartre seems equally to imply that skiing becomes part of a way of life, something that the Savoyard becomes attached to, as a practice. Skiing is more than a convenient mode of transport for the Savoyard. Skiing entails not only the practical know-how which allows one to do it (in a specific way), but also an ethos in which skiing is valued and embraced as positive expression of identity and the good life. Moreover, the technical capacity to ski shapes the individual’s perception of their environment such that it suggests skiing to them; the snow takes on an inviting aspect to those with the know-how to take advantage of it. If I am right that Sartre’s reflections on technique commit him to a notion of socially shaped dispositions, then this has considerable significance in relation to the claims of his sociological critics. Socially shaped dispositions lie at the heart of Bourdieu’s (1992a) sociological critique of Sartre. The demonstrable existence of such dispositions, he believes, challenges the conception of freedom posited by Sartre. Similarly, the critique of Sartrean ‘freedom’, which Merleau-Ponty offers in the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception and such essays as ‘The Metaphysical in Man’, hinges partly on ‘habit’ (or ‘passivity’) and the impact of the (sedimented) past on the present (PP and Merleau-Ponty 1971). Both writers subscribe to a dispositional view of the social actor (to varying degrees and with different levels of subtlety); both believe that human dispositions are socially acquired

226 Nick Crossley

and shaped, that they are cultural techniques; and both find these notions incompatible with Sartre’s insistence on absolute human freedom. If Sartre has a notion of socially shaped dispositions, then much of this critique drops away. This invites a further question, however: whether the notion of socially shaped dispositions is compatible with Sartre’s wider account of freedom. Does Sartre contradict himself when discussing techniques, or does his concept of freedom allow for socially shaped dispositions? I will not pretend to second-guess Sartre’s intent here. However, I will pursue this issue of the compatibility of notions of dispositions and social influence with a conception of human freedom. I believe that the notion of technique is compatible with a qualified conception of freedom. Whether this is Sartre’s conception remains an open question and one for those with greater knowledge of his oeuvre than I have. I note, however, that he makes reference, somewhat enigmatically, to ‘conditioned freedom’ in the closing section of Being and Nothingness (see also Kruks 1990). This expression would be a suitable label for the conception I will defend. If body techniques are the product of society, this is society understood as a web of human interaction. Society enjoys no existence independently of human (inter)activity. To say that body techniques are social, therefore, is to say that they take shape within the weave of our interactions. In itself, therefore, the notion that body techniques are ‘social’ does not contradict the notion of human freedom, at least not in the sense that it implies determinism or passivity on behalf of social actors. It suggests that we make our own body techniques, but not individually or in isolation. This may call for a greater and more nuanced understanding of human interaction than Sartre offers but that is a different matter. In addition, learning is an activity. It is something that we do, not something that happens to us. Again, then, there is no implication of either determinism or passivity. Moreover, as the sociologist Erving Goffman reminds us, many of the routines of adult life (Goffman doesn’t use the term ‘body techniques’) are actually quite hard to master at first. Learning takes considerable effort and persistence: To walk, to cross a road, to utter a complete sentence, to wear long pants, to tie one’s shoes, to add a column of figures – all these routines that allow the individual unthinking, competent performance were attained through an acquisition process whose early stages were negotiated in cold sweat. (Goffman 1972: 293) We may, of course, be pressured into learning things that we do not wish to learn and threatened with undesirable sanctions if we don’t, but such


227

pressure is political or moral. We are persuaded or coerced – not caused – to act in particular ways. Moreover, in many cases the motivation to act is more positive. Body techniques are enabling or empowering, and actors desire to acquire them for this reason. Presumably the Savoyard wants to learn to ski because it looks like fun, because everyone they know skis and they do not want to be left out, or because the alternative – trudging through the snow – is less attractive. And they follow the example of their peers, learning to ski as the Savoyard ski, because emulation is the easiest and most obvious way to learn, and because skiing, for them, simply is whatever those around them are doing. Other ways (techniques) of skiing are neither apparent nor in question. Having said that learning is an activity, however, there is an aspect of it which appears to operate beneath our choice and conscious awareness, indeed beneath our sense of our own volition. Husserl (1973), who also has a conception of habitus, draws this point out most clearly, simultaneously pointing to the way in which this pre-reflective tendency can be incorporated within consciously chosen projects: [The] transformation of the results of an originally intuitive apprehension into a habitus takes place according to a general law of conscious life, without our participation, so to speak, and it therefore takes place even where the interest in the object is unique and transient . . . but it can also be that one strives to establish this habitus voluntarily. . . . Such an interest will give occasion to a repeated running through of the explicative synthesis . . . (Husserl 1973: 123; emphasis in original) The process whereby an action becomes a habit is not directly in our power: it ‘just happens’. But we know that we can make it, or at least help it happen, by repeating an action. And in some cases we do this. To say that habit formation is involuntary is not to say that it is mechanical. Much of Merleau-Ponty’s (PP and 1965) work on habit, whilst echoing Husserl, points to the multiple ways in which habit defies mechanical description. He emphasizes the role of improvisation in habitual action, the transferability of skills both across situations and through the body,1 and the holistic2 manner in which they are typically learned. To acquire a habit or technique, for Merleau-Ponty, as for Mauss and Bourdieu, is to grasp a principle rather than internalize a mechanical pattern of action. The principle may only exist at a motor level, such that it can only be grasped at that level (that is, by doing it rather than thinking about it), but it is irreducible to a mechanical behavioural template. Techniques or uses of the body also lie beyond our volition in the respect that they can be difficult to shape or shake off. In part this is because,

228 Nick Crossley

as Sartre acknowledges, we perform them without reflection or conscious awareness. We may not be aware of some of our bad habits because they are so automatic that we do not notice them, but even when we do notice them they are difficult to change because we execute them without reflection or conscious awareness and therefore ‘find’ ourselves doing or having done them. To change them we must cultivate a new habit of spotting the situations where we are likely to err, so that we can work on our response and ‘re-program’ ourselves. Even this isn’t always straightforward, however, partly because habits make life easier, and extinguishing them therefore makes life more difficult, at least until new habits are bedded in, and also because some habits are involved in the management of our emotional life (for instance, stress, anxiety or boredom) and stopping them can expose us to strong and unpleasant feelings. Of course, some are also tied to physiological addictions, such that their place within our personal repertoire is reinforced by unpleasant feelings of withdrawal which appear in their absence. Are these acquired dispositions contrary to the freedom on which Sartre insists? Is the disposition to form dispositions contrary to freedom? I am not convinced that the language of ‘freedom’ is helpful, but if we are to stick with it, then I suggest that it necessitates a qualified or ‘conditioned’ conception. There are two aspects to this. First, the concept of disposition does not suggest determinism because, as Sartre noted with respect to technique, dispositions are not external to us. I am my dispositions. They are part of me. However, as Merleau-Ponty notes, this does suggest that I am not, as in Sartre’s formulation, ‘nothing’. I am something. I am, for example, a Savoyard, and as such I have a particular manner of being-in-the-world, manifest in my skiing. My action in and experience of the world is mediated by a range of techniques drawn from the groups to which I belong (although, of course, I and my contemporaries may modify our techniques and invent new ones). Freedom is conditioned in this respect in that my action is an expression of what I am. My action does not come from nowhere or nothingness. Putting that another way, my existence may pre-date my essence, as Sartre (1948) claims, but the ways in which I construct myself have a durable impact on me in the form of acquired dispositions. I do acquire an essence, so to speak. Moreover, the ways in which I construct myself are shaped by the fact that I am born at a particular time, in a particular place, within a particular community (the latter point being the key here). Secondly, the concept of disposition does not suggest determinism because I can become reflexively aware of both my dispositions and the process whereby they are formed, and can pursue projects of self-change. I will have to work the ‘materials’ I am presented with, struggling against the stubbornness of my own dispositions (both acquired and innate). But the power to achieve change within my own behaviour potentially lies with me.


229

Or rather, it does if my body and habits strike me as a potential ‘project’ and as sufficiently plastic to admit of modification. And that depends on the way in which ‘bodies’ are constituted by the ‘generalized other’. In contemporary societies we experience our bodies as ‘projects’ to be worked on, but it has not always been so. This brings us back to where we started: reflexive embodiment. I am both my body and my habits and dispositions, but I have this body and these habits too and I may elect to work on and change them. Indeed, my body and habits present me with choices. But they only do so within a context. Reflexive projects of bodily change do not emerge in a vacuum. As noted above, we become aware of our own bodies and bodily habits via the perspective of others, both particular and generalized, and not least through language and culture. If my body and habits seem plastic to me this is, in some part, because my culture involves discourses and techniques of selfchange which frame my experience of myself in this way. Again, then, my freedom to change myself is conditioned. I may or may not decide to implement change but the possibility exists for me in virtue of my socio-cultural inherence.

Conclusion Where it has not been neglected, Sartre’s work has been subject to somewhat dismissive critiques by sociologists. In this chapter I have tried to disarm some of these by showing that and how his work anticipates and accords with important ideas from within the sociology of the body: namely, the notions of reflexive embodiment and body techniques. Sartre’s analysis of the body serves not only to root his conception of subjectivity within the physical world, but also within the social and cultural world. Our bodies both involve us in relations with others and embody cultural forms or techniques which are specific to the group(s) to which we belong. Sartre’s further reflections on the compatibility of these claims with his wider claims regarding human freedom are also important, not least for sociologists who seek constantly to juggle claims regarding the importance and impact of the social world on human action with claims regarding human autonomy. In the final analysis, however, working through Sartre’s own attempt to manage this balancing act point us to a qualified form of freedom perhaps akin to the ‘conditioned freedom’ alluded to in the final pages of Being and Nothingness, rather than the more uncompromising sense of absolute freedom for which Sartre is better known. Embodied being, as both Beauvoir (1967) and Merleau-Ponty (PP) recognized, occupies an ambiguous position between the clear-cut alternatives of the Sartrean system (in itself and for itself ), even in Sartre’s own analysis.

230 Nick Crossley

Notes 1. I learn to write with a pencil in my right hand, for example, but that equips me to write in the sand with my left leg or a stick. I write best with my right hand, but my competence isn’t entirely localized there. 2. When we are learning a technique, Merleau-Ponty argues, we orient to the gist (the overall pattern of action and its aim) rather than the individual movements that may be involved.

References Beauvoir, S. de (1967). The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel. Beauvoir, S. de (1986). The Second Sex. London: Picador. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1992a). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1992b). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity. Craib, I. (1976). Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crossley, N. (2001). The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: Sage. Crossley, N. (2006). Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Societies. Buckingham: Open University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1972). Relations in Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grimshaw, J. (1999). ‘Working out with Merleau-Ponty’. In Arthurs, J. and Grimshaw, J., eds. Women’s Bodies. London: Cassell, 91–116. Hayim, G. (1996). Existentialism and Sociology: The Contribution of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Transaction. Husserl, E. (1973). Experience and Judgement. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kruks, S. (1990). Situation and Human Existence. London: Unwin Hyman. Mauss, M. (1979). ‘Body techniques’. In Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 95–123. Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1965). The Structure of Behaviour. London: Methuen. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1971). Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sartre, J-P. (1948). Existentialism and Humanism. London: Methuen. Sartre, J-P. (1968). Search for a Method. New York: Vintage. Sartre, J-P (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso. Tiryakian, E. (1979). Sociologism and Existentialism. Chicago: Ayer. Young, I. M. (1980). ‘Throwing like a girl’. Human Studies 3: 137–56. Young, I. M. (1998) ‘Throwing like a girl revisited’. In D. Welton, ed. Body and Flesh. Oxford: Blackwell, 286–90.

14 The Socially Shaped Body and the Critique of Corporeal Experience Elizabeth A. Behnke

Introduction: delimiting the field of inquiry The ‘socially shaped body’ Phenomenological approaches to embodied experience are sometimes criticized by those studying the social construction of the body, who claim, for example, that phenomenological work not only focuses on atemporal ‘essences’ at the expense of historical/cultural situatedness, but routinely assumes and privileges ‘private’ experience and individual freedom while ignoring the very real inscription of the social in the corporeal. Can there indeed be a phenomenology of the socially shaped body? Let us see.1 First of all, much of the debate about the social construction of the body arises as a reaction to the hegemony of naturalistic explanations of the body.2 Working phenomenologically, we can trace the dichotomy between the ‘body as a natural entity’ and the ‘body determined by society, culture, and history’ back to the respective attitudes of the natural and cultural sciences,3 attitudes whose correlates are precisely the body ‘as’ natural and the body ‘as’ cultural. But another move is also possible: namely, to put in question the received dichotomy between ‘nature’ on the one hand and ‘mind, spirit, or culture’ on the other. Husserl offers us two ways of going about this. He initially points out that neither of these received categories can accommodate lived bodily experience when it is truly lived on its own terms, and suggests that a third category is needed – one that he saw as the province of a new type of science he called ‘somatology’. Such a science would have two branches, one concerned with the body as a physical reality, the other devoted to embodied experience as lived by the embodied experiencer himor herself.4 Yet despite including first-person experience, somatology would still ultimately focus on the body as something ‘psychophysical’ that bridges the gap between the ‘physical’ and the ‘psychic’ while remaining irreducible to either of these traditional regions. Subsequently, however, Husserl comes to see that it is not enough to make room for a new ontological region of sentient bodies ‘between’ the realm of sheer physical nature and that of mind or 231

232 Elizabeth A. Behnke

psyche and culture: instead, we can suspend our automatic acceptance of the initial dualistic framework itself, making no use of it while we trace the very notion of the ‘psychophysical’ to its sources and investigate alternative starting points.5 I shall accordingly set aside the debate between the ‘naturally’ and the ‘socially’ determined body in order to address the question of the socially shaped body in purely phenomenological terms. But first it is necessary to offer some provisional clarification of the way in which the notions of ‘shaping’ and the ‘shaped’, of ‘determining’ and the ‘determinate’, are to be understood in this investigation. First, ‘determination’ is often taken to mean ‘causal determination’, but this will be firmly placed in brackets here; the project of causal explanation will be set aside in favour of the phenomenological task of critique of presuppositions,6 coupled with a radical turn to the experiential dimension and to the appropriate Evidenz.7 In this context, ‘determinateness’ will refer to material/contentual (sachhaltig) specificity, to the experience of a possibility being filled out in a particular way (rather than in some other way).8 However, I am also placing in brackets the notion of a ‘determinate’ world (where, for instance, bodies simply ‘are the way they are’) in favour of a dynamic notion of bodily plasticity, of the ‘protean body’.9 In other words, I am not denying either that I am always ongoingly embodying myself in a particular way or that my current ongoing style of embodiment is socially shaped;10 what I am setting out of play is the assumption that such shaping is either total or final. Instead, I am leaving room for transformative somatic practice and other modalities of bodily re-education that can free the lived body from its current shaping and reshape it anew. But there is yet another presupposition to be identified here – namely, that all such bodily ‘shaping’ unilaterally comes from the outside, so that the body is ‘shaped by’ whatever external forces or practices it may passively encounter. In contrast, I want to understand the lived body not only as a locus of affection and undergoing, but as a source of spontaneity and initiative. This need not deny the relational nature of lived bodily life;11 instead, it simply recognizes that something other than one-sided determination is at work. Moreover, despite Sartre’s celebrated descriptions of being transfixed and defined by the other’s gaze,12 I do not want to take the lived body solely as a visible object. Instead, I will be concerned with the lived body lived from within as sentient/sensitive motility, and with certain ways in which the social shaping of this situated, sentient, relational body is ongoingly carried out by this body itself as a self-shaping motility. More specifically, I shall address some qualitatively different ways of ‘making a body’.13 By this locution (coined in analogy to such familiar English expressions as ‘making a fist’ and ‘making a face’), I mean ongoingly embodying oneself in a particular way at ‘presuppositionally deep’ levels. Here I am referring to levels that function as practical preconditions for further, more complex activities based on them, as when we note that being able to maintain some form

The Socially Shaped Body 233

of upright posture is a prerequisite for playing the violin; the presuppositionally deep strata are literally ‘assumed’ in the activities, tacitly taken up in them – reinstated, reiterated, maintained in them, not only in principle but as a particular ‘how’. For example, a person’s habitual, ‘normal’ stance might already be characterized by a particular way in which his or her feet make contact with the ground. Then, when the person begins violin lessons, this particular way of being a ‘footed’ creature and this particular way of relating to ‘gravity’ and ‘ground’ as fields of balance and support14 are automatically swung into play as the currently unthematized foundation on which the specific gestures proper to violin playing will be built. Other important elements include one’s habitual postural alignment; one’s ‘baseline’ tonus (the level of ambient muscle tone from which the experiences of feeling ‘tense’ or ‘relaxed’ are gauged); the limits and leeway of the ‘practical kinaesthetic horizon’ (Hua 11/15) dictating one’s currently available range of movement, along with one’s accustomed movement pathways and usual vectorial patterns of combining different kinaesthetic systems;15 and the typical quality, texture and dynamics of one’s movement. Such factors inform all lived bodily doing and undergoing, and to thematize them does not sever them from our relational situatedness, but sets in motion a line of research that can make descriptions of bodily relationality far more precise.16 Although I shall indeed consider the socially shaped body as a body visible to others, the true research focus of this chapter will accordingly be the relational body understood as a body that is not a ‘thing’, but an ongoing style of kinaesthetic self-shaping and situational engagement. I shall approach this living, moving body in phenomenological terms, that is, on the basis of the appropriate experiential evidence, lived from within by the embodied experiencer concerned in each case. Yet I also want to carry out this work in the spirit of a critique of corporeal experience. What does this mean?

The ‘critique of corporeal experience’ I am borrowing the phrase ‘critique of corporeal experience’ from Enzo Paci.17 Here, however, I would like to take Paci’s notion in a specific direction, using the Husserlian notion of ‘crisis’ as a leading clue. Although the word ‘crisis’ has a range of everyday meanings, the Husserlian nuance I shall emphasize is crisis as a crisis of anonymity, in two respects. On the one hand, the crisis itself is anonymous in the rather loose sense that it is not recognized for what it is: it conceals itself as a crisis and thus functions anonymously. On the other hand, there is a specific type of anonymity that lies at the heart of the crisis in question: namely, the anonymity18 of constitutive performances that have not yet been retrieved by the transcendental-phenomenological inquiry that first brings them to light and shows the ‘pre-given’ world to be the correlate of a consciousness or (inter)subjectivity informed by certain attitudes, accepting certain


assumptions, performing certain abstractions, operating on the basis of certain sorts of passive syntheses of association, and so on. But bringing all this to light is not an easy task; in fact, it presents extraordinary difficulties (see, for example, Hua 6/122f.), and one reason is that the very subjectivity that performs such constitutive operations has been taken as a constituted ‘object’ – one object among others in a ready-made world.19 Husserl addresses these issues through a critique and transformation of psychology. However, the crisis is also rooted in the automatic acceptance of the ready-made body as a natural, ‘physical’ thing thought in contrast to a (disembodied) constituting ‘consciousness’ within the framework of an inherited dualism that leaves no room for the constitutive role of sentient/sensitive motility, of kinaesthetic consciousness as a situated freedom whose correlate is the practical/perceptual world.20 In other words, the crisis in question involves treating the body as a constituted object while the kinaesthetic performances of the body-as-constituting21 remain anonymous.22 What is the appropriate response to such a crisis? It is crucial to recognize that the response cannot merely consist of setting out of play the naturalistic apprehension of the body in order to address it within a personalistic attitude, insofar as this particular type of a ‘return to lifeworldly experience’ remains within the natural attitude. In other words, the specific crisis I am discussing is not resolved if we set aside the causally explained body and attend, for example, to the gestures and glances of the expressive, communicative bodies we encounter within a shared, pre-given world.23 Instead, I am suggesting that the appropriate response to crisis is critique – in this case, a transcendental-phenomenological critique of corporeal experience. Such a critique requires various investigations, one of which we have already set in motion by bringing one of the fundamental presuppositions of the crisis to light: namely, the root assumption that the body is a particular kind of ‘thing’, defined in advance in terms of a received ontological dualism.24 We can also fruitfully trace various aspects of the ‘already constituted’, ‘readymade’ social body back to a constituting social intersubjectivity and to the discourses and practices that hold a particular constitutive style in play.25 But a further step is also possible: I can take myself as one example, here and now, of the crisis in question, and I can begin to consult the relevant phenomena for myself, in ‘filled’ and ‘firsthand’ fashion (rather than ‘emptily’ and ‘second-hand’). This requires not only retrieving my own kinaesthetic life from its usual anonymity, but inquiring whether I am blindly and uncritically performing a species of self-constitution in accordance with a particular ‘public’ constitutive style, naively living-along in it without ever recognizing it for what it is; realizing how I am ongoingly holding it in play; questioning its legitimacy; or allowing alternatives to emerge from my own, directly lived embodied experience.


In short, if the response to crisis is critique, the outcome of critique is radical self-responsibility – here, kinaesthetic self-responsibility. Yet since the kinaesthetically functioning body is at the same time a situated, relational body – and hence a culturally intercorporeal, interkinaesthetic body – the critique of corporeal experience need not be thought solipsistically. Instead, it will leave open the parallel possibility not only of cultural critique, but also of a cultural renewal26 contributing to the practical realization of a truly genuine humanity (Hua 27/55). Thus in the next section I develop one aspect of a theoretical critique of corporeal experience; then I present some elements of a practical critique of corporeal experience; and finally, I sketch the role of an authentically ethical body in our embodied sociality.

Toward a theoretical critique of corporeal experience What resources already exist within the phenomenological tradition to address the socially shaped body? One structural feature of social shaping can be approached by way of a variation on three Sartrean ‘ontological dimensions’ of the body: the body-for-itself, the body-for-others and the body-for-itself-for-others.27 As we know, Sartre himself employs these distinctions in service of a larger ontological project, based on a radical disjunction between the categories of the en soi and the pour soi, and some scholars have suggested that Sartre’s theoretical framework does not truly do justice to the lived body and the varieties of lived bodily experience.28 Rather than entering into this debate, however, I shall take these dimensions as a starting point from which to describe three possible modes of embodied experiencing, before moving beyond these modes to a further crucial possibility. In the first mode, my body is a point of view on which I cannot have a point of view. Now, for Husserl, this is the theme of one’s own lived body as the centre of orientation, and one corollary of this basic structural feature of embodied experience is that one’s own body is itself a remarkably incompletely constituted visual thing (Hua 4/159). For Sartre, however, this is the theme of the body passed over in silence,29 transcended toward the task, pre-reflectively geared in with the situation, functioning in service of one’s project and utterly undisturbed either by the visibility of this comportment to others, or by one’s own reflective glance: one is oblivious to oneself, completely caught up in whatever one is doing, turned toward the world (for example, the referential complex of instruments)30 that opens up around the silent, efficacious body as its centre, without this body itself ever being thematized. It is, in short, the ‘absently available’31 or anonymously functioning body – a body that is ‘lived’ rather than ‘known’,32 and lived solely from its own standpoint, which is one of self-effacement in favour of the project that the embodied experiencer concerned is engaged in. The


following experiential vignette from the lifeworld33 points toward one such experience: I have been working on a paper for a deadline; to spur myself on, I put a symphony by Anton Bruckner on the CD player. At a certain point, however, it ceases to be ‘background music’ – I have stopped trying to describe the dynamization of phenomenological concepts and am singing along with the orchestra at the top of my voice. Bom, bom, BOM! My hands and arms are moving, not performing the conventional gestures through which an orchestra conductor keeps time, but aiming and arriving, driving ever more deeply into an ever-cresting space. I am this energy, this piled strata of rising brass. Days later, I attempt to write up this description of being fully absorbed in the music. Yet this turns out to be rather difficult, not because I am dealing with a memory at a temporal distance, but precisely because I was not observing myself at the time; rather, I was immersed in the experience of embodying and enacting this music – not even partnering ‘it’ as the mountain climber partners the rock, but living the brass lines as they partner themselves, with the strings sawing away for support. And now that I come to think of it, this experience that I am falling short of describing here is very much like the lived experience of actually playing in a symphony orchestra, being part of a living texture in which all the voices are joined, pouring out beyond themselves at the leading edge, continually shaping the phrase toward the next note, for to look back and ‘reflect’ would destroy the very dynamic that sends the living, sounding present surging forth on its own ineluctable trajectory.34 Such a mode of embodied experience is often celebrated.35 But it can also be seen as a locus of crisis in need of a critique of corporeal experience, for as a body of sensory-motor amnesia,36 it bears its social shaping blindly, as it were. In a similar vein, Mauss’s seminal notion of culturally varying ‘techniques of the body’37 has been critically elaborated in terms of a distinction between bodily ‘technologies of alienation’, which disempower individuals and promote social control of the body by ‘authorities’, and bodily ‘technologies of authenticity’, which assist us in taking radical self-responsibility for our own style(s) of embodiment on the basis of our own directly lived experience.38 Thus the body passed over in silence is not only always and already a socially shaped body, but may well be an alienated body that has become numb to the corporeal conditions of its own expropriation and exploitation. In other words, the absence of any awareness of one’s own style of embodiment – for example, of one’s own habitual postural style (a style presuppositionally entailed and maintained across the modifications it permits, even as one is absorbed in the situation and borne along with it) – does not automatically guarantee that this style of embodiment is the most authentic one possible. I shall return to this below.


First let us return to the Sartrean schema for a look at the second mode or dimension, which takes the body as a point of view on which there can indeed be a point of view. This possibility is required even to identify the first dimension of the body as a body that is indeed transcended toward a project, yet is carrying out its activities in a particular, culturally shaped way, for although from the actor’s perspective these are matters that are lived but not known, they are also phenomena that can be seen by an observer, recognized for what they are and described in detail. And for Husserl, the constitution of myself as a point of view on which there can be other points of view plays an even more fundamental role: a constituting intersubjectivity is a necessary structural requirement for a correlative, constituted intersubjectivity of which I myself am a member.39 But in addition to acknowledging these structural implications of the second dimension, we can also ask: what is the directly lived experience of being a point of view upon which a point of view can be taken? Here I shall identify two possible aspects of this experience. The first might be termed ‘palpable intercontact’. This need not imply a moment in which I actually see, not ‘organs’ called ‘eyes’, but a gaze that emanates from them and takes me in; instead, it could refer to a subtle but experientially discernible moment of sensing-oneself-seen, as in knowing one is being followed even without looking behind oneself or hearing footsteps, or feeling the other’s gaze before turning to see it.40 The second aspect – which is intertwined with the first and lends it its contentual specificity of detail – could be called a ‘conversation of projects’. Sartre’s own descriptions tend to focus on cases where what is immediately palpable in the actual moment of encounter is a tension or conflict between two projects – mine and the other’s – that are incompatible in principle. A second experiential vignette from the lifeworld can serve as an example: I have decided to go look at the river on my birthday, so I walk down to the entrance to the park. I cut across the field toward a picnic table located just outside the grove of trees growing next to the river, and I sit there for a few minutes, enjoying the sun. Then I decide to walk through the trees to a certain bench off to the right on the river path, since it looks like a very nice place to sit. Suddenly, however, just after entering the grove of trees, I’m aware that I am ‘on somebody’s radar’: there is a man sitting off to the left by the beginning of the river path, and I somehow know not only that he is aware of me, but that the situation is not a safe one. How do I know this? There is no specific clue other than my intercorporeal certainty that he has stiffened to attention in the same way that a spider does when it senses a fly in its web. Immediately, I pretend that I am not aware of the man at all, but am engrossed in examining the huge old roots and trunks of the trees in the grove; at the same time, I attempt to give the impression of someone wandering aimlessly among the trees, even while I am actually gradually moving out of the trees, back toward


the sunny field. Once I am out in the open, in a place where I am safely visible from the road, I begin ostentatiously looking up at the treetops, while covertly keeping track of the man on the path. He gets up from where he had been lying in wait, casually strolls along the river path to the very same bench that I had been headed for, and sits down there himself. Somehow this convinces me not only that although this man is trying to look harmless, his intentions are far from friendly, but also that he is very well aware of how the terrain looks from my vantage point, and is consciously attempting to exploit this for his own purposes. He is a predator who has set up his trap, and he sees me as prey. I turn around and head across the field toward the road. When I am almost there, I pause to look back. The man is gone, nowhere to be seen. ‘Nothing has happened’ – for example, I can’t even complain to the police, because there is nothing concrete to complain about. Nevertheless, my directly lived experience has unmistakably been one first of ‘wariness’ in the face of potential danger, then one of ‘saving myself’ from this danger: I refuse his project and retain my own autonomy. And this embodied response has its own evidential criteria for ‘clear and present danger’, whether or not I can justify this rationally, or even offer a convincing description of the palpable tone or tension I experienced, in a direct bodily fashion, among those trees that day. But projects can also converge positively in various ways, as when, for example, I see a person in trouble, so I call out to others and we all start running over to help, which gives the person – who now sees that help is on the way – the strength and the courage to hang on until we get there. These sorts of cases, which I have offered as examples of the second dimension, could lead to further investigations of the variegated types of conversations of projects that the experience of intercontact can inaugurate. For instance, I might want to describe the dynamics of releasing myself from the other(s)’ vector(s) or of moving-with them, as well as distinguishing a struggle for dominance between two competing projects; an embodied negotiation between different but compatible projects; and various degrees of alliance or fusion between joint projects. Descriptively, however, we already seem to be moving into the terrain of Sartre’s third dimension, which is perhaps the area where my proposed account differs most noticeably from his. If the first mode of embodied experience is one in which my body is a point of view on which I cannot have a point of view, and the second is one in which not only ‘the’ body but ‘my’ body is a point of view on which there can indeed be a point of view, the third mode might be described as one in which my own body is apprehended – by me – solely or primarily from the ‘point of view’ of another or others. Here the quotation marks around ‘point of view’ signify that what is at stake is not some sort of literal ‘out-of-body’ experience in which – under conditions of extreme dissociation – ’I’ find


myself looking at ‘myself’ from the outside. Instead, what I want to highlight is that it is possible to differentiate the moment of experientially registering a palpable instance of being-seen (the second mode) from a moment of effectively co-positing the particular way in which I am being seen by another or others (the third mode).41 Here the notion of being ‘seen’ is shorthand for being apprehended in general, and this includes not only being seen-as this or that, but being seen in certain terms, within a certain context – all of which automatically gives rise to certain expectations and implications and exposes me to certain consequences. In short, the apprehension is not a momentary affair, but comes with horizonal predelineations, exerting an effect that goes far beyond any specific occasion in which the point of view in question is actually in force. And the problem arises not only from the specific tone of this global apprehension, but from the degree to which I tacitly ‘go along with it’ and allow it to displace my own sense of myself and of the situation. Yet another experiential vignette from the lifeworld can convey something of the general structure of this type of situation: I have just finished presenting my paper at a philosophy conference; a lively discussion has just come to an end, and people are moving into the hallway where an informal reception is already underway. I have just poured myself a glass of wine when a local faculty member from another discipline comes up to me and says, ‘How does it feel to have just seduced thirty men at once?’ Several things are immediately clear to me within this unusual social encounter. For example, I can tell from the gentleman’s body language that he does indeed have in mind the sexual connotations of the word ‘seduce’ rather than any of its other dictionary meanings, although it is also clear from his general demeanor (as well as from the kind of social setting in which the encounter is taking place) that he himself is not necessarily attempting to initiate a personal relationship with me. He is not a sexual predator; he does not pose any personal danger to me in this regard. In fact, he apparently thinks that he is paying me a compliment. I, however, am immediately offended to hear that my serious attempt to present the results of some original phenomenological research is being interpreted as an exercise in sensual enticement. I verbally reject his compliment, displaying indignation; he backs off immediately, but is defensive rather than apologetic. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the terms in which he phrased his compliment might be considered insulting. I smooth over the social situation as best I can, and move on. But I am bothered by the incident for several weeks. Then I send a friend an e-mail in which I tell her the story, emphasizing how hard I had worked on the paper and how the man’s remark made it seem like it was all for nothing, since I had failed in my attempt to be seen as a competent professional colleague. Her response comes quickly and unequivocally, sympathizing with my distress, but reminding


me that by reacting in this way to what the man said, I have been giving him power over me. With her help, then, I begin to realize that without really being aware of it, I have been a silent partner in the other’s project; my distress can be traced back to my having co-constituted myself in his terms. And at this point, the entire situation shifts and I start laughing, because it dawns on me that I had already planned to discuss this very structure in writing about the socially shaped body – yet despite my theoretical awareness of the structure in question, it had still managed to affect me in my everyday life. Thus what is at stake in this third mode of embodied experience is not merely a particular contentual apperception-as, but a naive living-along-in this apperception and accepting it as holding good; what is posited not only stems from the other, but has the aura, ‘this is the way it is’, with the determinative force of positing both Sein (‘it is this way’) and Sosein (‘it is this way’). In other words, the problem here is not just one of being controlled by another’s project and deprived of my own. Instead, it consists of automatically or uncritically co-participating in this displacement or decentring by defining myself in terms of the project into which I have been subsumed – which often means not only allowing myself to be seen in a generic or stereotyped way, but tacitly assuming it as a permanent, all-pervasive and inescapable framework, an obligatory horizon haunting me wherever I go. It should, of course, be acknowledged that my own complicity in copositing myself as the other sees me need not always involve characterizing myself in a negative or limiting way. For instance, There exists . . . a look of another . . . that makes the world bloom and renders the body straighter and suppler. . . . There is a loving look that can bestow a fiat on my work and at the same time justifies the body that does this work.42 It would seem that the only difficulty with the ‘accepting look of the other’ that ‘gives me the almost exceptional right to be myself as a moving body’43 arises when a person continually seeks approval and authorization from the accepting, appreciating gaze of another and lacks the autonomy to be responsible for his or her own freedom. However, phrasing the issue in terms of the encouraging (or disparaging) look of a single other does not address the broader social patterns in which sedimented, institutionalized perspectives haunt our lives. The problem in the latter case is that when I feel this larger ‘look’ engulf me and I turn to see whose eyes are subsuming me into this or that stereotype, there is no one there to blame: the constitutive gaze that ‘influences factical identities along collective lines’44 is the anonymous gaze of ‘society’,45 and it is this anonymous constitutive efficacy that I may


find myself in uncritical complicity with, simply by virtue of my being a member of a particular society and social group. Sandra Bartky’s project of a ‘modest and “situated” phenomenology’ of oppression46 provides one concrete account of the way in which individuals can wind up tacitly accepting, co-positing and thus reinstating within their own constitutive lives the social shaping that dominates and ‘inferiorizes’ them.47 She identifies, for example, experiential patterns of ‘wariness’ that continually anticipate the always threatening possibility of disparagement or outright attack (18f.), as well as other disabling patterns of alienation and objectification (22ff.) and of shame (83ff.). But one especially notable aspect of her work couples Beauvoir’s feminist appropriation of Sartre’s notion of the look of the other (38) with Foucault’s discussion in Discipline and Punish of the model of the Panopticon and of the role such a model plays in the social production of docile bodies (64f., 79ff.). This allows Bartky to delineate how the ‘fashion–beauty complex’ – a term coined to accompany the notion of the ‘military–industrial complex’ (39) – not only functions as a global apprehension in which women’s bodies are seen as inherently, visibly inferior (‘there is something wrong with us as we are’ [29]), but requires each woman to become ‘a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance’ over her own permanent visibility (80), thereby internalizing the constant social surveillance that monitors a woman’s looks, and values her worth accordingly. A woman may therefore spend hours engaged in body-tending activities motivated by her tacit acceptance of the necessity of living up to impossible standards of beauty, slenderness, youth, and so on (see chapters 3, 5). And this entire structure hinges on equating the woman’s worth with her external appearance as seen through the lens of socially shaped standards: she is both reduced to her visible surfaces and judged by them by others, even by herself. The result is a totalizing objectification in which she is inevitably seen within a particular attitude and perspective, with other ways of viewing her marginalized and occluded. Thus Bartky’s reflections belong among the analyses that unmask the dark side of vision’s power to have the visible at its disposal, including not only Sartre’s recognition of the ‘violating’ power of vision as ‘possession’,48 but also Walter Biemel’s analyses of the destructive domination of women in certain forms of twentieth-century visual art.49 In fact, Biemel goes even further, warning us that this is only one example within a broader cultural trend toward objectifying our fellow humans – a trend that leads to the horror and cruelty of an absolute violence precluding all resistance.50 But must we simply accept such a trend? Is there really no possibility of creative, positive resistance? Is there truly no liberatory practice through which to defuse these dominating objectifications? Here a descriptive detail from one of Husserl’s many analyses of the structure of visual experience can offer a clue to help us move toward a practical response to such questions. As Husserl demonstrates, vision is structured in


such a way that everything it grasps can be given only one-sidedly, and that the ‘here’ from which seeing proceeds is necessarily separate from and overagainst the ‘there’ that is seen (Hua 36/94). In addition, however – and this is the detail I want to emphasize – it is always and everywhere the seeing of surfaces: when I look at the thing, I do not see its ‘inside’; in order to do this, I have to cut it open or break it into pieces. But even then, all that I can see are the new surfaces that come into view as I look at the various pieces now from this side, now from that (Hua 36/92). Let me now take this descriptive detail further, beyond Husserl’s own concern in this passage. We have traditionally used the metaphor of ‘inwardness’ in discussing the soul or psyche (or the mind or consciousness). But such an experiential ‘inwardness’ is nowhere to be found when we penetrate the surfaces of the body, whether we probe the depths of the dead body through dissection or explore the depths of the living body through more modern and less invasive medical technologies. As Husserl puts it, ‘Joy and sorrow are not in the heart in the same way in which the blood is, tactile sensations are not in the skin in the same way that parts of its organic tissues are’ (Hua 13/115). Thus the dimension of experiential ‘inwardness’ cannot be seized by ‘looking’ for it ‘from the outside’, but requires a new register that I will characterize as a lucid awareness from within, carried out by each experiencer in the first person – an awareness that does not at all have to alienate one from one’s own body, but can indeed embrace the unique mode of ‘non-objectifying’ bodily self-appreciation that is directly available in each case only to the embodied experiencer concerned.51 For me, such awareness is most fundamentally a matter of a kinaesthetic consciousness, of kinaesthetic capability lucidly lived in the immediacy of primal motility. But such embodied agency is also associatively linked with its own coappertinent somaesthetic sensibility – with the particular felt texture that comes with moving in a particular way and provides me with a lived sense of anchored aliveness52 in my ongoing relational dialogue with the world and with others.53 Thus rather than remaining within the framework of the three Sartrean modes or dimensions of embodied experience – the anonymously lived or ‘absently available’ body, the palpably seen body and my own body accepted by me as seen from the perspectives and agendas of others – I want to make room for a dimension Sartre leaves out, namely, for a ‘primary appreciation’54 of the ongoing ‘how’ of my own embodiment.55 Moreover, I would like to suggest that developing the ability to tap into this ongoing variegated experiential dimension can provide an appropriate means for studying the social shaping of bodies in fuller detail, from within the lived experience of such shaping, here and now. For example, although I have highlighted Bartky’s account of the visually-based objectification (and self-objectification) of women’s bodies by the ‘fashion–beauty complex’, her research is actually geared toward ‘inferiorization’ per se, no matter who the target may be, whose social interests the inferiorization may serve, or how,


precisely, this inferiorization is ongoingly maintained.56 Is it, we might ask, a matter of a mainly ‘mental’ conviction, or might it be effectively sustained through habitual bodily postures? In her discussion of shame, for instance, Bartky not only refers in general to ‘the cringing withdrawing from others’ as a ‘cringing within, this felt sometimes as a physical sensation of being pulled inward and downward’, but also specifically mentions a configuration with ‘head bowed, chest hollowed, and shoulders hunched slightly forward’.57 If this is an example of a socially shaped body suffering under a deficit of ‘external’ (and/or ‘internalized’) social approval, a body pervaded with its own inadequacy, what postural configuration would not only express, but actualize the personal dignity of authentic embodiment firmly founded on the directly lived experience of embodied agency and anchored aliveness? What type of community would ongoingly shape and sustain bodies this way? What type of sociality do such bodies call for and make possible? These are huge questions opening up many areas for further investigation. For example, it would be crucial to identify specific practices in which personal bodily inwardness is respected and cultivated, rather than violated and suppressed – practices that foster both individual kinaesthetic autonomy and healthy interkinaesthetic connectivity. Here it is only possible to take some initial steps toward the practical critique of corporeal experience that such matters call for. The task of the next section is accordingly to catch a specific type of social shaping in the act and to identify a particular type of embodied practice that can help us to exercise a measure of kinaesthetic selfresponsibility over the way in which we are ongoingly, corporeally shaping ourselves.

Toward a practical critique of corporeal experience Within the natural attitude we find many concepts that were initially derived and developed within a specifically naturalistic attitude, but – at least in some social settings – have subsequently seeped into everyday consciousness as common currency. And within the field of transformative somatic practice (encompassing a variety of ‘body awareness’ approaches as well as hands-on ‘body work’), one such notion is that of the ‘startle reflex’, also termed the ‘startle pattern’ or the ‘withdrawal response’.58 However, for the somatics community, these terms are not merely natural-scientific concepts, but can be ‘cashed in’ for the fulfilling experience of the pattern itself. More specifically, the startle pattern is a phenomenon that one can learn not only to recognize in others, but to feel directly for oneself. In addition, it is a pattern one can learn to undo and inhibit. Thus although this pattern, which is considered an instinctual response that humans share with many vertebrates, has often been studied by researchers in the natural sciences, here I shall be concerned with specific modalities of bodily re-education – notably the Alexander Technique59 – that can retrieve the pattern from anonymity,


appreciating it experientially and effectively submitting it to a practical critique. As I have indicated, both the Husserlian notion of somatology and the contemporary field of somatics are expressions of the need to go beyond inherited dualisms (mind vs. body, nature vs. culture), precisely because the evidence of embodied experience itself requires rethinking these received categories. The startle pattern is no exception, for although it can indeed be taken as a ‘natural’, instinctual response, it also carries cultural meanings, and these can be diverse. Thus my comments on its possible social signification(s) are situated remarks, not exhaustive global interpretations. First, however, let me offer a brief description of this bodily pattern. Imagine someone startled by a sudden loud noise. The neck muscles suddenly tighten, and the head shrinks back into the shoulders while the shoulders simultaneously come up; the chest begins to cave in, the flow of breath is interrupted and the entire body flexes into an incipient crouch in an automatic effort to withdraw from danger. Ideally, one would simply return to an optimal, ‘non-startled’ mode of upright posture on realizing that there is no danger after all. But the startle response can also become a sedimented style of embodiment, whether as a tendency to shorten the neck prior to performing any movement whatsoever, or as an ongoingly maintained pattern of contractions functioning as a practical presupposition for all my bodily activities. Clearly, the problem at issue for a practical critique of the socially shaped body is not the momentary, situationally appropriate activation and subsequent, situationally appropriate release of this cluster of reflexes. Rather, what stands in need of critique is the ongoing, pervasive, yet unnoticed selfshaping whereby one continually shrinks oneself into some version of the startle pattern. Now opinions vary about the genesis of this tendency for the startle response to become a habitual component of one’s habitual posture. For example, some see it as the natural outcome of a design flaw in an organism that was really not meant to sustain upright posture for long periods of time, while others attribute it to the general stress of modern civilization on a creature whose nervous system has not evolved rapidly enough to cope with it. It is also possible to recognize the sunken body, with the breastbone collapsing down and in, as the enduring effect of such emotions as grief and despair. From here one can readily make a general connection between the sunken body and the lived bodily experience of radical disempowerment – of shame, as Bartky describes it, of helplessness, of undergoing a domination against which resistance is not only futile, but impossible. In short, the startle response fits the general profile of inferiorization as a habitual bodily style not only of keeping oneself down and holding oneself back, but of inviting, through this pervasive gesture of self-oppression, further denigration and domination by others. How can such a pattern be approached in a genuinely practical way?


Although any individual style of ‘making a body’ may have multiple origins and may affect how one is socially seen in a variety of ways, one key to reshaping the socially shaped body lies in realizing that this shaping is not something that has already been accomplished once and for all, but is an ongoing, dynamic process. Moreover, although many social factors can shape the body in many ways, it is possible to identify a certain type of situation in which the startle response in particular tends to occur and to bring this response to lucidly lived awareness, allowing us to catch it in the act, rather than letting it have its anonymous way with us. Don Hanlon Johnson has characterized this major social dimension of the startle pattern as ‘shrinking before authorities’.60 Consider the following example from Andrea Olsen’s BodyStories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy: I lived one summer in the house of a bright, young anesthesiologist who was involved in heart transplant surgery. He was also a runner and complained to me of back problems. We worked with his alignment and noticed that his chest was retreated and that this, combined with a forward head, put stress on his lower back. As we brought his posture into vertical alignment, he took a deep breath and said, ‘I could never stand like this. I would threaten my colleagues and my patients.’ He had unconsciously adopted a posture that was nonthreatening and noncompetitive in order to work in an environment which was both. It had given him a certain amount of emotional safety while he developed in his career, but it was now literally hurting him. The question became, was he ready to stand at his full height?61 Here it is very important to note that what is at stake is not the actual, measurable height of a person’s body, but a postural ‘signature’ of taking up less space in the world so that others are not challenged. Correspondingly, it is also important to note that if one individual transforms his or her style of making a body, the change reverberates throughout the local social fabric as well, and can introduce some strain in the status quo. Moreover, I must emphasize that for many of us, the world is not experientially a very safe place. The vulnerability of opening up to the world and claiming one’s full height in it, rather than shrinking in stature and keeping a low profile, is not always wise. But the point here is not to inaugurate new (and impossible) social standards that would require the body to be open, rather than caved in, at all times. Nor am I suggesting that we need to attain some sort of absolute freedom and control over our native bodily registering of the physiognomic tone of the situation. Instead, the point is to retrieve our own ongoing self-shaping from anonymity and to take some measure of kinaesthetic self-responsibility for it – especially with regard to our habitual posture as the tacit standard from which the limits and leeway of our bodily possibilities as a whole are gauged. And this is a process that cannot


be equated with the mechanical manipulation of our bodily alignment by others, but requires the cultivation of a kinaesthetic awareness capable of appreciating the lucidly lived body from within. Husserlian investigations of kinaesthetic consciousness can be quite helpful in this regard, since the phenomenological findings do not assume the language of such natural sciences as anatomy from the start and can, therefore, let other, experiential orders emerge. However, firsthand practical work with one’s personal patterns of bodily self-shaping is crucial for achieving something like authentic embodiment. And such embodiment is still relational, even if the body retrieved from anonymity and transformed from within no longer fits neatly into the social patterns currently in place. We can thus ask ourselves: what are the new horizons of sociality implied by the authentic body? What kind of ‘lived bodily intersubjectivity’ (Hua 4/297) or intercorporeity is horizonally predelineated here? Can we move beyond a one-sided shaping ‘of’ bodies ‘by’ society to a true correlativity or co-relativity in which it is possible, in principle, to remake the reigning styles of sociality through alternative style(s) of corporeal – and intercorporeal – comportment?62 Such questions cannot be definitively answered here. I will nevertheless turn to Sartre’s work again in order to sketch out one avenue of approach to such matters.

Embodied sociality and the critique of intercorporeal experience As Adrian Mirvish has demonstrated, Kurt Lewin’s notion of hodological space63 plays a key role not only in Sartre’s approach to the lived body, but also in his account of intersubjectivity. The underlying notion here is that of a play of tension within a dynamic field of forces such that objects have a certain ‘valence’ (attracting or repelling) and motivate certain ‘vectors’ that move in a certain direction (toward or away from something) with a certain degree of intensity – all organized in terms of the current needs, interests and goals of the embodied experiencer. Mirvish is accordingly able to show that whether I become an object for another as subject or the other becomes an object while I remain a subject, the hodological fields of forces of both parties participate in a dynamic interaction.64 Now there is normally a temporal dimension to such fields of force, since the field structure includes both the shifting aims and interests of the experiencer(s) and the play of possibilities newly emerging in the environment. However, the lived experience of feeling my own field of force as ‘wavering’ or ‘endangered’65 – as when I sense myself ‘surrounded by what is experienced as a negative field of force’66 – can shut down the temporal fluidity of my responsive involvement with the environment and others, leading to a frozen, sedimented style of (dis)engagement: If a situation becomes hopeless, that is, if it becomes as a whole inescapably disagreeable, the child, despairing, contracts, physically and psychically,


under the vectors coming from all sides and usually attempts to build a wall between himself and the situation. This is expressed both in the typical bodily gesture of despair (crumpling up, covering the eyes with the arms, etc.) and by a sort of encysting of the self: the child becomes obdurate.67 Thus instead of shrinking myself vertically to avoid threatening the other, I shrink away from everything, not only contracting my body, but constricting my world, with the legacy of the difficult experiences I have undergone inscribed in my habitual way of making a body for all to see. But are we in fact willing to acknowledge such phenomena? Are we truly able to see – and feel – the other’s bodily field of force (or to be aware of one’s own)? Is this merely a metaphor, or does it provide one clue toward a more authentic embodied sociality? Think, for example, of the following sorts of everyday examples: feeling a person invisibly withdrawing from an interaction while simultaneously standing unmoved in objective space; experiencing an instant current of contact where the other and I are already palpably connected ‘on the same wavelength’ and dancing the same dance, no matter how much our visible choreographies appear to differ; sensing my friend’s non-verbal ‘no – not now’, which is not a matter of visible cues, but is reminiscent of the sensation of a ‘distancing’ force that appears between my hands when I am holding two magnets in such a way that they repel or refuse the joining that they so readily accomplish under other conditions; being aware of the ‘lateral’ openness of the other silently begging me to wait until her current ‘face-to-face’ interlocutor is finally willing to let go of the conversation he has been prolonging in order to bathe in her attention as one would bask in the rays of the sun. Such nuances are seldom thematized. But once we have become attuned to them, they multiply as if by magic and inform the felt texture, the lived landscape of our interconnectedness in myriad ways, affording many possibilities for a phenomenological description of embodied sociality – and for a critique of intercorporeal experience as well. As my concluding example, I shall accordingly consider yet another shrinking – one that occurs when we shrink from the suffering of the other. What I have in mind here is the discomfort we may feel when, for instance, a victim of a violent rape, horrendous child abuse or unimaginable torture attempts to tell us his or her story – or simply stands before us, in what would be a shared space if we were not already pulling back and protecting ourselves.68 Sartre has certainly given us resources to understand the body that has been appropriated by the project of the other. But what is going on in the presence of embodied distress (whether utterly mute or straining the seams of the words that attempt to give it voice) is a more subtle gesture – a refusal of community, as it were, not because we do not care, but because the invisible dimension of inter-kinaesthetic affectivity leaves each sentient/sensitive


motility all too available to the affective vectors criss-crossing the interkinaesthetic field. How can I bear witness to the unbearable suffering of others when I cannot even bear their embodied presence? As an ethical body, however, I must find a way of standing my ground in the presence of others’ pain so they need not deny it, hide it or bear its burden alone. In other words, I must learn to live my own field of force in a way that supports these others rather than shutting them out. When Sartre insists that the body is ‘lived’ rather than ‘known’, he is indeed saving a space for a body that is not an object over-against a subject. As I have indicated, however, there is also the possibility of suffusing my own, socially shaped style of bodily comportment with a lucidly lived awareness that does not make me (or the other) into an object, but allows me to take a greater degree of kinaesthetic selfresponsibility for how I am living my own embodied situation while at the same time more fully respecting the interkinaesthetic dynamics that make it our situation. And this, I believe, can prepare the way for a genuine critique of intercorporeal experience – one capable of truly addressing the crises of global civilization and healing what has been wounded in the collective corporeality of this wider we.69

Notes 1. In what follows, I draw on Husserlian research methods as well as on Sartrean concepts; my goal, however, is a descriptive elucidation of the matters in question, not a comparative study of Husserlian and Sartrean philosophies. Citations from Husserl are illustrative rather than exhaustive. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Second Korean-American Phenomenology Conference, Memphis, 2004. I am grateful to participants for their responses. 2. This is particularly true of feminist attempts to free gender from biological essentialism. Foucault (1977: 148; cf. 153) provides an extreme example in insisting that the body cannot be understood by ahistorical physiological laws, but is ‘totally imprinted by history’. For a critique of the attempt to understand the body solely in cultural terms, see Bigwood 1998. 3. For an historical summary of Husserl’s work on this issue, see Hua 32/xviii ff. 4. See, for instance, Hua 5/5–19, esp. 8; for more detail, see Behnke 2008c, Part I, A. 5. Cf. Behnke 2008c, Parts I, Bff., where I take up Husserl’s transcendental critique of the category of the ‘psychophysical’, trace it to an underlying assumption of the body as a ‘thing’, and suggest proceeding in terms of the Husserlian notion of ‘kinaesthetic consciousness’ instead; see also Behnke 2008a, §5. 6. On critique of presuppositions, see, for example, Hua 19–1/24, 28f.; Hua 17/279, 283; Hua 34/66, 176, 303ff.; HM 8/41, and see also Behnke 2009, §4. 7. Here the notion of ‘evidence’ must be taken dynamically, as a transition from something meant ‘emptily’ to the fulfilling itself-givenness of the same something. See, for example, Hua 19-1/10, 44f., 56f.; Hua 19-2/§§8ff., §38 (esp. 651); Hua 16/9; Hua 7/79; Hua 25/32; Hua 3-1/41; Hua 20-1/319–26; Hua 32/220; Hua 17/§§58–60 (esp. 170). Cf. Mohanty 2008: ch. 8, and see also Behnke 2004: 23f.; 2009: §4.

The Socially Shaped Body 249 8. Note that what is at stake here is not the model of a ‘substrate’ with certain ‘characteristics’, but the actualization of one possibility among a broader range of possibilities within a particular experiential dimension (for example, the walls of the room I am about to enter for the first time will be some colour, although which colour I shall experience is left open until I actually see the walls). 9. Johnson 1977; cf. Behnke 2008d. 10. ‘Each of our bodies is an artifice, a community project visibly manifesting the values of those implicated in the task’ (Johnson 1983: 66). 11. See Behnke 2007, 2008a. 12. See EN 310ff./BN 252ff./340ff. (Here and throughout, the first BN reference is to the Philosophical Library edition, the second to the Washington Square Press paperback edition.) 13. See Behnke 1997: §2. Johnson 1997: 1–13 (esp. 8f.) also speaks of ‘body-making’; our descriptive projects are complementary insofar as Johnson focuses on social origins of styles of embodiment and I focus on the ongoing efficacy of any such style, regardless of origin (personal history, social practices, cultural assumptions, and so on). 14. On fields of balance and support, see Behnke 2003, §3. 15. On kinaesthetic systems, see Behnke 2008c, Part II. 16. For both Husserl and Sartre, a subject ‘centres’ a situation (see, for example, HM 8/35, 57; EN 368f./BN 306f./405f.; EN 379ff./BN 316ff./417ff.; Monasterio 1980: 51ff., 57f.). Moreover, this subject is bodily for both, something Husserl classically expresses by referring to the lived body as the ‘null-point’ or ‘zero-point’ of orientation; see, for example, Hua 4/158. However, this centre is not a sheer ‘point’, but has its own inner organization, and is not ‘nothing’ but calibrated, as it were, at a certain ‘setting’ that both reflects and affects how the situation is lived (cf. Behnke 2008d). 17. See Paci 1972: 44ff., 467; Behnke 2001: Part I, E. 18. On the anonymity of functioning performances, cf., for example, Hua 6/114ff., 209, 457f.; Hua 15/508, 538ff.; Hua 17/185, 194; Hua 34/160, 251ff., 396f., 447, 452; Hua 39/23ff., 470f.; HM 8/7f., 36, 53, 187, 338. 19. Under the heading of the ‘ready-made’, I mean to suggest (following Husserl’s notion of ‘fertig’) not only what has been ‘received’ – handed down ‘as is’ and uncritically accepted in the naïveté of the natural attitude – but also what is taken as ‘fixed’. Paci (1972: 250) suggests a link between Husserl and Sartre with respect to the critique of a ready-made world: insofar as Husserl’s task is to clarify the anonymous and ‘bring it to the level of . . . responsibility’, he is demonstrating that ‘freedom coincides with the negation of the given as such’, which resonates with Sartre’s notion that ‘freedom passes through necessity’. Cf., for example, HM 8/18 on the need for a critique of our own facticity. 20. For example, the perspectival givenness of things is inseparable both from our situatedness and from our motility, since it is only our freedom to move that makes the current perspective ‘a’ perspective horizonally predelineating further possible appearances of the same thing or of its surroundings. 21. On the distinction between the body-as-constituted and the body-as-constituting, see Landgrebe 1981: 56, 60ff., 63. 22. For relevant discussions in Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, see Hua 6/§28, §47, §62. Note that the theme of the kinaesthetically functioning lived body is introduced in §28, in immediate anticipation of the reflections in §29 on a hitherto ‘anonymous’ realm of the


23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

subjective; similarly, the discussion of the fundamental subjective phenomenon of kinaesthesis appears in §47 immediately following the call in §46 to display the universal correlational a priori; and finally, the description in §62 of kinaesthetically holding sway stands at the heart of the critique of Cartesian dualism carried out in Part III, B. Thus the turn to the body-as-constituting appears at key points in the architecture of the Crisis, and the discovery of the correlational a priori through the retrieval of constituting subjectivity from anonymity is intimately bound up with the discovery of a kinaesthetic consciousness irreducible to a framework in which ‘disembodied mind’ and ‘sheerly physical nature’ are the obligatory and all-embracing categories. This is not to deny the value of studying such matters as the body as an icon of desire, bodily display as emblematic of social status, and so on, but merely to recognize that such investigations take place on the ground of the ready-made world and leave deeper problems untouched. Cf. Paci 1972: §§12ff. (esp. 66). Although I am critical of the presupposition that the body is at bottom a thing of a specific sort (cf. n. 5 above), it is also important to mention analyses that do indeed emphasize the body’s membership in the order of (passive) things; see, for example, Monasterio 1980: 54ff., cf. the discussions in Paci (1972: §73f.) of Sartre and the problem of practico-inert praxis. For more on the Husserlian notion of ‘style’, see Behnke 2004: 25ff. Husserl addresses the issue of cultural renewal in the Kaizo essays (see Hua 27/3–94). Van den Berg 1962: 107ff., 118ff., provides a convenient introduction to Sartre’s discussions of the three ontological dimensions of the body (EN 368–427/BN 306– 59/404–70); my own reading is indebted to the discussions of bad faith in Gordon 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; see also his contribution to this volume. See, for example, Zaner 1964: 106–25, esp. 119ff.; Dillon 1974. EN 395/BN 330/434. EN 385ff./BN 321ff./423ff. I borrow this evocative phrase from Gallagher 2004: 278 et passim. EN 388/BN 324/427. Note that all of my examples must be understood in terms of what Zaner (1978, esp. 9) has termed the ‘exemplicating’ move: rather than taking any instance for its own sake, in its unrepeatable existential uniqueness, I take it as ‘an example of ’ a ‘more generous common denominator’, a shared structure that could be exemplified by a number of different instances or occasions. See also Behnke 2009: §6. For those who would like to try out the lived experience of being immersed in a Bruckner symphony in this way, I suggest the 4th movement of the Fourth Symphony as a particularly good starting point. Cf., for example, Leder 1990, passim. On sensory-motor amnesia, see Hanna 1988; cf. Behnke 2008d. Here it is not possible to enter into a discussion of the social production of sensory-motor amnesia, but some leading questions may at least be formulated: if you are unable to feel your own needs clearly, will you not be more susceptible to advertising designed to cast you as a consumer? If you cannot directly and immediately appreciate the degree of ease and restriction in your own kinaesthetic performances, will you not be more susceptible to exploitation by employers and injury from inappropriate ‘ergonomic’ design? If your capability for intercorporeal empathy has been blunted by a government that sees war as a video game and torture as a


37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

routine strategy, will you not be more susceptible to selective blindness concerning human rights abuses? If the circumstances of your life have made you numb with terror, does this not violate you still further by making it difficult to reach out to others in basic intercorporeal compassion and community? See Mauss 1973. (This lecture was originally delivered 17 May 1934.) See Johnson 1983: 80, 143f., 153f., 167ff., 181ff. In other words, Husserl’s research question is not how the Körper (physical body) I see is constituted as a Leib (lived body) of another subjectivity, but how I, living my own Leib, am constituted as one lived body among coequal others. Note that Sartre’s discussion of the second ontological dimension assumes that the same structures govern both the way my body appears to the other and the way the other’s body appears to me (EN 405/BN 339/445), although he addresses only the latter; for critical remarks, see Zaner 1964: 123ff.; Dillon 1974: 149ff. Other, less visually accented cases might include, for example, sensing myself silently supported by the person I can feel standing behind me, even though we are not actually touching; being caught up in the rhythm of the other’s movement (again, even without actual tactile contact); gratefully responding to the calm serenity emanating from another person, or flinching as the other’s wave of rage crashes over me (even if I am not being physically attacked), and so on. For more examples, see Behnke 2008a: §4. Thus a man hiking on a remote trail may well suddenly feel himself seen as ‘prey’ – yet without automatically co-positing the project of the mountain lion looking at him. (I am indebted to my brother, Jim Behnke, for this example.) Van den Berg 1962: 115. Van den Berg 1962: 127. Gordon 1995a: 114. Gordon 1995b: 48. Bartky 1990: 2 (subsequent parenthetical citations in the present paragraph refer to this work). As she emphasizes (4), her works should not be understood as ‘mere theoretical excursions’, but are meant to be ‘political interventions as well’. Bartky (1990: 22, 122 n. 4) traces her use of the term ‘inferiorization’ in characterizing what she terms ‘psychological oppression’ to a phrase in a 1970 paper by Joyce Mitchell Cook, who referred to the ‘internalization of intimations of inferiority’. EN 666f./BN 578/738. See Biemel 1968: 255ff.; cf. 1972: 508ff. Biemel 1968: 262f. On the contrast between ‘lucid awareness from within’ and a mode of ‘separative seeing’ that makes everything into an ‘object’ over against a ‘subject’, see Behnke 1984. The notion of ‘lucid awareness from within’ rests on the notion of ‘reflexivity’ developed by Mohanty (1970, Part III, Ch. 1), in which reflexivity is taken as a second fundamental possibility of consciousness, alongside but irreducible to intentionality, and hence ‘reflexivity’ is not identical to ‘reflection’, which makes some part of the reflecting agent’s own streaming consciousness into an intentional object; cf. also Mohanty 2008: 130, 148. Note that Sartre rejects the possibility of such bodily reflexivity; see EN 366/BN 304/402, EN 388f./BN 324/427. See Behnke 2002. My focus on the localization of kinaesthetic capability in somaesthetic sensibility – with the latter including, but not limited to, tactile sensitivity – can be


54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

contrasted with critical discussions of Sartre’s approach to touch. See, for example, Mazis 1979; P. S. Morris (reprinted in this volume), pp. 151–2, 156–7. Van den Berg 1962: 116. Cf. Behnke 2008b: 49ff. Thus to Bartky’s account – and the critique of surfaces mentioned above – should be added the work of Frantz Fanon, Thomas Slaughter, and Charles Johnson on the ‘epidermalization’ of the Black body (cf. Sobchack 2004: 196ff., and see also Alcoff 1999, esp. 20ff., on the role of visibility in the experience of race). Bartky 1990: 86, 89. See Jones 1969; Hanna 1988: 49–59, 68–74. For introductions to the work of F. M. Alexander (1869–1955), see, for example, Alexander 2001; Maisel ed. 1969; cf. also Johnson 1997: 100–11. Note that John Dewey studied the Alexander Technique himself (see Bloch 2004: 106ff., 185f.) and wrote prefaces to several of Alexander’s books (see Maisel ed. 1969: 169–84). Johnson 1983: ch. 1. Olsen 1991: 9. The dancer, choreographer and phenomenologist Sabrina Castillo (personal communication) relates a similar story of a male dancer with beautifully well-aligned posture who never felt comfortable maintaining this posture outside the dance studio. As John O’Neill asks, ‘Can we radically rethink society with our bodies? Or are we caught in categorical systems that think us?’ (O’Neill 1985: 63; cf. 18, 51, 151). See Mirvish 1984: 154ff.; cf. EN 386/BN 322/424; EN 388/BN 324/427. Mirvish draws on Lewin 1935, and points out (Mirvish 1984: 172 n. 29) that both Lewin and Heidegger were influenced by von Uexküll – who, we should add, also influenced Merleau-Ponty. See also Mirvish’s contribution to this volume. Mirvish 1984: 165ff. Mirvish 1984: 166. Mirvish 1984: 167. Lewin 1935: 94, as cited in Mirvish 1984: 166f. An even stronger example is found in El-Bizri 2006: 312f.: ‘The relation with the other becomes saturated with pain in an encounter with the meaninglessness of the unbearable suffering suffocating the face of the other, which appears as a cry suspended in silence. A mouth is stretched to the limits of its flesh by a soul bursting out from its embodiment, and hardly containable in its afflictions; a scream that the ear does not hear in its prolonged silent exiting until the human voice becomes deafeningly heard. This vocal deferral of declaring what is expressed in the pained flesh is petrifying. Levinas’ face-to-face encounter appears in this situation as being innocent, calm, and resigned. Suffering is rather a ripping of a face in my face. The other petrifies me by this tearing agony that arrests time in the prolonged voicing of a . . . cataclysmic distress.’ For related considerations concerning the ethical gaze in filming the event of death, cf. Sobchack 2004: 226ff., esp. 249ff. My closing phrase is inspired by Husserl, who wrote in 1932, ‘Das Wir hat seine kollektive Leiblichkeit’ (Hua 39/181).

References Alcoff, L. M. (1999). ‘Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment’. Radical Philosophy 95: 15–26. Alexander, F. M. (2001). The Use of the Self. London: Orion Books. (Original publication 1932.)

The Socially Shaped Body 253 Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. Behnke, E. A. (1984). ‘World without opposite / flesh of the world (a carnal introduction)’. Felton, CA: California Center for Jean Gebser Studies. Available at www.lifwynnfoundation.org. Behnke, E. A. (1997). ‘Ghost gestures: phenomenological investigations of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal implications’. Human Studies 20: 181–201. Behnke, E. A. (2001). ‘Phenomenology of embodiment/embodied phenomenology: emerging work’. In S. Crowell, L. Embree and S. J. Julian, eds. The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Vol. 1, Ch. 5. www.electronpress.com. Behnke, E. A. (2002). ‘Embodiment work for the victims of violation: in solidarity with the community of the shaken’. Inaugural meeting of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations, Prague, now available at www.o-p-o.net. Behnke, E. A. (2003). ‘Contact improvisation and the lived world’. In M. Diaconu, ed. Kunst und Wahrheit. Festschrift für Walter Biemel zu seinem 85. Geburtstag. Bucharest: Humanitas, 39–61. Behnke, E. A. (2004). ‘On the dynamization of phenomenological concepts: an experimental essay in phenomenological practice’. Focus Pragensis 4: 9–39. Behnke, E. A. (2007). ‘Bodily relationality: an experiment in phenomenological practice (VII)’. In Phenomenology 2005. Vol. 5: L. Embree and T. Nenon, eds. Selected Essays from North America. Bucharest: Zeta Books, 67–97. Behnke, E. A. (2008a). ‘Interkinaesthetic affectivity: a phenomenological approach’. Continental Philosophy Review 41: 143–61. Behnke, E. A. (2008b). ‘Husserl’s protean concept of affectivity: from the texts to the phenomena themselves’. Philosophy Today 52 (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy supplement), 46–53. Behnke, E. A. (2008c). ‘The human science of somatics and transcendental phenomenology’. Nordic Society for Phenomenology, Kaunas. Forthcoming in Zmogus ir zodis. Behnke, E. A. (2008d). ‘Null-body, protean body, potent body, neutral body, wild body’. International Merleau-Ponty Conference, Toronto. Forthcoming in K. Maclaren and D. Morris, eds. Time, Memory, Institution. Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of the Self. Behnke, E. A. (2009, in press). ‘Working notions: a meditation on Husserlian phenomenological practice’. In P. Blosser and T. Nenon, eds. Advancing Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Springer. Biemel, W. (1968). Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Biemel, W. (1972). ‘Pop art and the lived world’. Tr. E. G. Ballard and A. von Schoenborn. In L. E. Embree, ed. Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 489–519. Bigwood, C. (1991). ‘Renaturalizing the body (with the help of Merleau-Ponty)’. Hypatia 6: 54–73. (Rpt. in D. Welton, ed. Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 99–114.) Bloch, M. (2004). F. M.: The Life of Frederick Matthias Alexander, Founder of the Alexander Technique. London: Little, Brown. Dillon, M. C. (1974). ‘Sartre on the phenomenal body and Merleau-Ponty’s critique’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5: 144–58. El-Bizri, N. (2006). ‘Uneasy interrogations following Levinas’. Studia Phaenomenologica 6: 293–315.

254 Elizabeth A. Behnke Foucault, M. (1977). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Tr. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gallagher, S. (1986). ‘Lived body and environment’. Research in Phenomenology, 16: 139–70. (Rpt. in D. Moran and L. E. Embree with T. Staehler and E. A. Behnke, eds. Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy. Vol. 2: Phenomenology: Themes and Issues. London: Routledge, 2004, 265–93.) Gordon, L. R. (1995a). ‘Sartrean bad faith and antiblack racism’. In S. G. Crowell, ed. The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 107–29. Gordon, L. R (1995b). Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Gordon, L. R (1995c). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Hanna, T. (1988). Somatics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Husserl, E. (1950ff.). Husserliana. The Hague and Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Academic/Springer. (Abbreviated ‘Hua’ in this essay.) Husserl, E. (2001ff.). Husserliana Materialien. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic/Springer. (Abbreviated ‘HM’ in this essay.) Johnson, D. H. (1977). The Protean Body: A Rolfer’s View of Human Flexibility. New York: HarperColophon. Johnson, D. H. (1983). Body. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Johnson, D. H., ed. (1997). Groundworks: Narratives of Embodiment. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Jones, F. P. (1969). ‘Method for changing stereotyped response patterns by the inhibition of postural sets’. In Maisel, ed., 191–204. (Abridged from Psychological Review 72 [1965].) Landgrebe, L. (1974). ‘Reflexionen zu Husserls Konstitutionslehre’. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 36: 466–82. (‘The problem of passive constitution’ Tr. D. Welton 1978. Analecta Husserliana 7: 23–36. Rpt. in D. Welton, ed. The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, 50–65.) Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewin, K. (1935). A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill. Maisel, E., ed. (1969). The Resurrection of the Body: The Writings of F. Matthias Alexander. New York: University Books. Mauss, M. (1936). ‘Les techniques du corps’. Journal de Psychologie, 32: 271–93. (Rpt. in idem, Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950, 363–86. ‘Techniques of the body’. Tr. B. Brewster. Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88.) Mazis, G. A. (1979). ‘Touch and vision: rethinking with Merleau-Ponty Sartre on the caress’. Philosophy Today 23: 321–28. Mirvish, A. (1984). ‘Sartre, hodological space, and the existence of others’. Research in Phenomenology 14: 149–73. Mohanty, J. N. (1972). The Concept of Intentionality. St. Louis, MO: Warren H. Green. Mohanty, J. N. (2008). The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Monasterio, X. O. (1980). ‘The body in Being and Nothingness’. In H. J. Silverman and F. A. Elliston, eds. Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 50–62.

The Socially Shaped Body 255 Olsen, A., with C. McHose (1991). BodyStories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. O’Neill, J. (1985). Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Paci, E. (1963). Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo. Milan: Il Saggiatore. (The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man Trs. P. Piccone and J. E. Hansen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972.) Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. van den Berg, J. H. (1962). ‘The human body and the significance of human movement: a phenomenological study’. In H. M. Ruitenbeek, ed. Psychoanalysis and Existential Philosophy. New York: E. P. Dutton, 90–129. Zaner, R. M. (1964). ‘Sartre’s ontology of the body’. In idem, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Part II, 57–125. Zaner, R. M. (1978). ‘Eidos and science’. In J. Bien, ed. Phenomenology and the Social Sciences: A Dialogue. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1–19.

Index of Names

This index excludes Sartre, J. P., for obvious reasons. Adjectival formations (for example, ‘Aristotelian’) are included under the relevant name (for example, ‘Aristotle’). Where references are to multi-authored works, they are alphabetized under the first author. Alain, E. C., 77, 81 n.28 Alcoff, L. M., 252 n.56 Alexander, F. M., 252 n.59 Allen, E., 198 n.22 Aristotle, 25–6, 28, 34, 37, 53, 81 n.28, 90, 143, 149, 221, 222 Arnheim, R., 63 n.46 Aron, R., 42 Ash, M. G., 19 n.18 Austin, J. L., 142 Ayer, A. J., 150, 158 n.3 Ayers, M. R., 110–11 Bachelard, G., 42, 61 n.14 Barnes, H., 137 n.2, 138 n.4, 205 Bartky, S. L., 2, 17, 212 n.48, 241, 242–3, 244, 251 nn.46, 47, 252 nn.56, 57 Beauvoir, S. de, 11–12, 17, 19 n.20, 84, 85–6, 89–91, 92–5, 97 nn.4, 5, 98 nn.16, 17, 18, 23, 148, 150, 151, 152, 156, 157, 158 n.4, 161, 172, 183, 197 n.1, 215, 229, 241 Becker, E., 92, 98 n.25 Behnke, E. A., author, ch. 14, 10, 15, 17, 18, 18 n.8, 177 n.2, 248 nn.4–7, 249 nn.9, 11, 13–17, 250 nn.25, 33, 36, 251 nn.40, 52, 252 n.55 Behnke, J., 251 n.41 Bell, L. A., 17 Bennett, J., 118 n.13 Bergson, H., 19 n.17, 42, 61 nn.11, 12, 163, 167, 168, 171, 171–2, 179 n.23, 180 n.32 Berkeley, G., 107, 109 Bermúdez, J. L., 118 nn.10, 11 Bermúdez, J. L., Marcel, A. and Eilan, N., 2 Biemel, W., 241, 251 nn.49, 50

Biggs, V., 164, 165, 166–7, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 nn.7, 9, 179 nn.17, 19, 20, 180 nn.24, 25, 26, 28, 181 n.40 Bigwood, C., 248 n.2 Biran, see Maine de Biran Blacking, J., 18 n.3 Blackwood, R. T., 158 n.1 Blijlevens, H., 165, 166, 167, 178 n.7, 179 n.20, 180 n.31, 181n.37 Bloch, M., 252 n.59 Bordo, S., 2 Bourdieu, P., 12–13, 18 n.2, 166, 215, 221, 222–3, 224, 225, 227 Bourgeois, P., 97 n.3 Bruckner, A., 236, 250 n.34 Brunschwicg, L., 61 n.15, 77 Buber, M., 39, 97 Butler, J., 2 Campbell, J., 2 Canguilhem, G., 19 n.21, 181n.38 Carman, T., 62 n.39 Cassam, Q., author, ch. 5, 14, 18 n.10, 117 n.5, 118 n.17 Cassirer, E., 187, 197 n.7 Castillo, S., 252 n.61 Catalano, J. S., author, ch. 1, 4, 9, 12, 19 n.16, 39 nn.1, 2, 4, 60 n.2, 62 n.36 Cavendish, R., 197 n.9 Caws, P., 198 n.42 Cayley, D., 213 n.60 Cherki, A., 197 n.1 Chrétien, J.-L., 41 Ciccariello-Maher, G., 212 n.50 Clark, A., 2 Classen, C., 63 n.45

256

Index of Names Cole, J., 118 n.12 Cole, J. and Paillard, J., 19 n.12 Colley, M., 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 176, 178 n.7, 179 nn.12, 13, 14, 19, 180 n.25, 181 n.39 Comte, A., 42, 61 n.10 Condillac, É. B. de, 42, 60 n.8, 61 n.9 Cook, J. M., 251 n.47 Cornell, D., 198 n.39 Couailhac, M., 61 n.9 Craib, I., 215 Crossley, N., author, ch. 13, 13, 17, 18, 18 n.2, 19 n.17, 212 n.50, 218 Csordas, T., 18 n.3 Daigle, C. and Golomb, J., 12 Damasio, A., 2 Dante Alighieri, 198 n.20 Davidson, D., 39 n.5 Davis, K., 181 n.42 Day, D., 139 Derrida, J., 124, 137 n.3, 217 Descartes, R., 10, 19 n.16, 26, 42, 47, 48, 61 n.9, 86, 97, 98 n.7, 116, 121, 149, 157, 184, 250 n.22 Dewey, J., 252 n.59 Diderot, D., 3 Dillon, M. C., 14, 44, 61 n.21, 250 n.28, 251 n.39 Dostoievsky, F., 134 Douglas, M., 18 n.3 Dresslar, F. B., 63 n.43 Drew, S., 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178 nn.7, 8, 179 nn.20, 21, 180 nn.25, 26, 181 n.40 Du Bois, W. E. B., 191, 198 n.22 Duden, B., 17, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207–10, 210 n.9, 212 nn.52–5, 213 nn.56–60 Durkheim, É. 221 Eckersley, J., 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 178 n.7, 179 n.14, 180 n.24 Eilan, N., McCarthy, R., and Brewer, B., 2 El-Bizri, N., 252 n.68 Elizabeth, Princess, of Bohemia, 60 n.7 Evans, G., 2, 18 n.10, 118 nn.8, 9, 10

257

Fanon, F., 18, 19 n.19, 183, 184, 187–97, 197 nn.2, 13, 198 nn.16–19, 21, 26–9, 31–3, 35, 39, 40, 252 n.56 Fechner, G. T., 63 n.41 Feldman, A., 207 Fell, J. P., 39 n.1, 80 n.17 Fichte, J. G., 128 Fink, E., 25 Firestone, S., 84, 85, 94, 97 n.6 Flaubert, G., 37, 38, 198 n.15 Flynn, T. R., 67, 79 n.2 Fox, N. F., 13 Foucault, M., 3, 12, 13, 18 n.2, 180 n.35, 197, 198 n.41, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206–7, 208, 210 nn.4–8, 212 nn.40–50, 215, 241, 248 n.2 Freud, S., 123, 140, 141–2, 144 Fullbrook, E. and K., 12 Gallagher, S., 2, 64 n.51, 250 n.31 Gallagher, S. and Cole, J, 19 n.12 Gelb, A. and Goldstein, K., 3, 19 n.13 Genet, J., 38 Gibson, J. J., 2, 11, 18 n.9, 63 n.46 Giddens, A., 3, 17, 219 Gide, A., 134 Goffman, E. 226 Goodman, N., 35 Gordon, J. A., 198 n.22 Gordon, L. R., author, ch. 11, 13, 17, 18, 19 nn.15 and 19, 161, 180 n.33, 197 nn.5, 10, 250 n.27, 251 nn.44, 45 Grandin, T., 171 Grant, D., 173, 178 n.7, 179 n.12 Grappe, J. , 61 n.12 Grimshaw, J., 223 Guendouz, C. , 61 n.12 Gutting, G., 61 n.15, 212 n.37 Hanna, T., 250 n.36, 252 n.58 Hartmann, K., 80 n.17 Hartsock, N., 92 Hayim, G., 215 Hayman, R., 197 n.1 Hegel, G. W. F., 34, 52, 68, 78, 79, 132, 143, 184

258 Index of Names Heidegger, M., 2, 4, 5, 19 n.24, 26, 27, 35, 37, 38, 39 n.1, 40 n.8, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 60 n.5, 62 n.34, 97, 124, 127, 132, 135, 136, 137 n.3, 178 n.7, 252 n.63 Henry, M., 19 n.21, 120, 124–9 Henry, P., 191, 198 nn.23, 24 Heraclitus, 157 Hessell, S. C., 165, 167, 173, 175, 178 n.7, 179 n.18, 180 n.24 Hill, J., 174–5, 176 Hippolyte, J., 79 Hoffmann, P., 60 n.7 Horder, T. J., 177 n.2 Howells, C., author, ch. 7, 13, 15, 16, 17 Hughes, C. E., 173 Hume, D., 10, 110, 123, 149 Husserl, E., 3, 4, 10, 11, 25, 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53–6, 57, 58, 59, 60 nn.3, 6, 61 n.18, 62 nn.24, 39, 63 nn. 42, 44, 46, 47, 123, 124, 126, 127, 151, 184, 197 n.3, 227, 231–3, 233–5, 237, 241–2, 244, 246, 248 nn.1, 3–7, 249 nn.16, 18, 19, 22, 250 nn.25, 26, 251 n.39, 252 n.69 Ihde, D., 2 Inahara, M., 175, 177n.2 Irigaray, L., 175 James, W., 63 n.43 Jaspers, K., 2, 39, 187 Johnson, C., 252 n.56 Johnson, D. H., 245, 249 nn. 9, 10, 13, 251 n.38, 252 nn.59, 60 Jones, F. P., 252 n.58 Joske, W., 112 Kant, I., 18 n.10, 30, 104–5, 106, 114, 117 nn. 1, 3, 118 nn. 14, 15, 16, 141, 147 n.2 Katz, D., 55, 56–7, 63 nn.46, 47, 51, 80 n.9 Kierkegaard, S., 25 Kirby, A., 167 Kissinger, H., 143 Koffka, K., 11, 80 n.13 Köhler, W., 11, 68–70, 80 nn.8, 10, 12, 13 Krueger, L., 63 n.46

Kruks, S., 215, 226 Kuosa, K. I., 209–10 Lacan, J., 187, 190 Laing, R. D., 73, 80 n.16, 204, 211 nn.30, 31, 32 La Mettrie, J. O. de, 3 Landgrebe, L., 249 n.21 Langer, M. M., author, ch. 12, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 210 n.2 Leder, D., 1, 2, 121, 163, 174, 217, 250 n.35 Le Doeuff, M., 97 n.2 Le Roy, G., 61 n.8 Lévi-Strauss, C., 19 n.15, 187, 188, 197 nn.8, 11, 14 Levin, D. M., 60 n.5 Levinas, E., 44, 61 nn.12, 18, 124, 252 n.68 Lévy, B.-H., 68, 78, 79 n.3, 80 n.5 Levy, N., 212 n.50 Lewin, K., 11, 73–4, 80 nn.6, 18, 20, 22, 246–7, 252 nn.63, 67 Lhermitte, J., 63 n.51, 192 Lingis, A., 40 n.8 Littlewood, R. and Lipsedge, M., 172, 173 Lock, M., and Farquhar, J., 1 Locke, J., 60 n.8, 103, 104–5, 106, 107, 117 n.2, 149 Lopez, N., 91 Maine de Biran, F.-P., 19 n.17, 42, 61 nn.9, 15, 120, 123, 124, 128, 129, 129 n.1 Maisel, E., 252 n.59 Malacrida, C., and Low, J, 1 Maldonado-Torres, N., 191, 198 n.25 Malraux, A., 135 Manser, A., 79 n.1 Marcel, G., 12, 39, 42, 61 n.13, 84, 86–8, 89, 90, 97, 98 nn. 8, 9, 10, 11, 129 n.1, 157 Matthews, E., 2 Mauss, M., 18 n.2, 19 n.17, 216–17, 221–2, 224, 225, 227, 236, 251 n.37 Mazis, G. A., 252 n.53 McBride, W. L., 198 n.38 Mead, G.H., 218

Index of Names Merleau-Ponty, M., 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18 n.2, 19 nn.13 and 20, 25–7, 27–8, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37–9, 39 nn.4, 6, 40 nn. 7, 8, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49–50, 50–1, 52, 53, 55, 56–7, 58–9, 60 n.3, 61 nn.12, 17, 18, 20, 62 nn.24, 26, 35, 39, 63 nn.45, 51, 86, 103, 111, 116–17, 123, 124, 161, 162, 163–6, 171, 174, 175, 177, 177n.5, 178 nn.7, 10, 183, 197 n.2, 200, 201–2, 203–4, 205, 207, 208, 210 nn.2, 10, 11, 12, 211 nn.22–8, 212 n.44, 215, 217, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230 n.2, 252 n.63 Mirvish, A., author, ch. 3, 11, 80 nn.6, 7, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 81 nn.25, 29, 246, 252 nn.63–6 Mohanty, J. N., 248 n.7, 251 n.51 Mol, A., 181n.38 Monasterio, X., 14, 15, 60 n.2, 249 n.16, 250 n.24 Moore, F. C. T., 61 n.9 Moore, G. E., 150 Moran, D., author, ch. 2, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19 n.17, 61 n.22, 62 n.34 Morris, K. J., author, Introduction and ch. 10, 14, 17, 18 n.5, 19 nn. 17, 22, 60 n.2, 162, 210 n.18 Morris, P. S., author, ch. 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 60 n.2, 252 n.53 Moulton, J., 147 n.1 Mui, C. L., author, ch. 4, 12, 17, 19 n.24, 60 n.2, 61 n.13, 129 n.1, 177n.5 Mullarkey, J., 126 Müller, G. E., 63 n.46 Murphy, A., 63 n.49 Murphy, J. S., 11–12, 97 n.3 Nagel, T., 139–41, 142–3, 144, 145, 146, 197 n.2 Nietzsche, F., 3, 25, 215 Nirenberg, D., 197 n.12 Niro, Robert de, 19 n.12 Nye, A., 97 n.2 O’Brien, M., 92–7, 97 n.2, 98 nn.26–31 Oksala, J., 212 n.50

259

Olsen, A., with McHose, C., 245, 252 n.61 O’Neal, J. C., 61 n.8 O’Neill, J., 61 n.8, 252 n.62 Orbach, S., 3, 171 Paci, E., 233, 249 nn.17, 19, 250 nn.23, 24 Parmenides, 30 Parshley, H. M., 177n.4 Paterson, M., 63 n.45 Peacocke, C., 105, 108, 114, 117 nn.4, 6, 7, 118 n.10 Peckitt, M. G., author, ch. 6, 15, 17, 19 nn. 17, 21, 177n.2 Pedersen, J. C., 97 n.3 Phillips, K. A., 62 n.28 Philpott, M. J., 162, 179 n.15 Pieterse, J. N., 198 n.30 Place, U. T., 158 n.3 Plato, 25–6, 130, 149, 154 Portwood, M., 165, 166, 167, 168, 177 n.1, 178 n.7 Pradines, M., 42, 61 n.12 Price, H. H., 110 Prinz, J., 62 n.38 Proudfoot, M., 2, 3 Putnam, H., 35 Quinton, A., 149, 158 n.2 Ratcliffe, M. J., 63 n.45 Reich, W., 141 Rich, A., 92 Rilke, R. M., 135 Ryle, G., 47, 217 Sacks, O., 3, 19 nn.12 and 13, 166, 171, 178 n.6, 180 n.29 Scheler, M., 42, 45, 60 nn.3, 4, 63 n.47, 80 nn. 6, 22, 158 n.6 Schilder, P., 19 n.13 Schwarzer, A., 97 n.4 Shilling, C., 3, 18 n.2 Shusterman, R., 1, 2, 4, 18 n.1, 19 n.22, 174, 177n.2, 178 n.10 Slaughter, T., 252 n.56 Smeets, M. A. M. and Kosslyn, S. M., 62 n.27 Snowdon, P., 18 n.6

260 Index of Names Sobchack, V., 252 nn.56, 68 Socrates, 149, 155 Solomon, R. C., author, ch. 8, 16 Spicker, S., 2 Spiegelberg, H., 63 n.47 Spinoza, B., 146 Stanghellini, G., 2 Stein, E., 47, 57, 62 n.28, Stewart, J., 12 Storch, J, 207–8, 212 nn.53, 55, 213 n.56 Strawson, P.F., 2, 110, 158 n.3 Tiryakian, E., 215 Titchener, E. B., 62 n.40 Trumbo, D., 155 Turner, B. S., 18 n.2, 19 n.12 Vallega-Neu, D. , 60 n.4 van Breda, H. L., 60 n.6 van den Berg, J. H., 250 n.27, 251 nn.42, 43, 252 n.54 Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Roach, E., 2

Vessey, D., 63 n.50 von Uexküll, J., 252 n.63 Waits, T., 123 Warren, D., 105, 117 n.3 Weber, E. H., 53, 56, 62 n.40, 63 nn.41, 43, 48 Welton, D., 2, 63 nn.44, 49 Wertheimer, M., 11 Whitford, M., 12 Widdershoven, G. A. M., 178 n.6 Wider, K. V., 15, 60 n.2, 81 n.28 Williams, B. A. O., 158 n.3 Wittgenstein, L, 18 n.1, 81 n.28, 176 Wundt, W., 62 n.40, 63 nn.43, 46 Young, I. M., 2, 20 n.25, 97 n.1, 123, 223–4 Zahavi, D., 124, 125 Zaner, R. M., 2, 158 n.5, 250 nn.28, 33, 251 n.39

Sartre on the Body (Philosophers in Depth)

Reid on Ethics (Philosophers in Depth)

Hume on Motivation and Virtue: New Essays (Philosophers in Depth)

Sartre on Theater

Database in Depth

Prolog Programming in Depth

Prolog programming in depth

Sartre

Written on the Body

Body on the Beach,

Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent

WordPress In Depth

Prolog programming in depth

Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty

WordPress In Depth

Network+ 2005 in depth

OSGi in Depth

Physical Chemistry in Depth

WordPress In Depth

Physical Chemistry in Depth

PMP in Depth

On Marx (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Arendt (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Pascal (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion

On Gödel (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Spinoza (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Husserl (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Husserl (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays

Philosophers

Sartre on the Body (Philosophers in Depth)

Reid on Ethics (Philosophers in Depth)

Hume on Motivation and Virtue: New Essays (Philosophers in Depth)

Sartre on Theater

Database in Depth

Prolog Programming in Depth

Prolog programming in depth

Sartre

Written on the Body

Body on the Beach,

Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent

WordPress In Depth

Prolog programming in depth

Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty

WordPress In Depth

Network+ 2005 in depth

OSGi in Depth

Physical Chemistry in Depth

WordPress In Depth

Physical Chemistry in Depth

PMP in Depth

On Marx (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Arendt (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Pascal (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion

On Gödel (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Spinoza (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Husserl (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

On Husserl (Wadsworth Philosophers Series)

Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays

Philosophers

Recommend Documents