Introduction
In the Göttingen lectures of 1907, particularly Ding und Raum (Thing and Space), Edmund Husserl delved into the relationship between the lived body and the phenomena of space and time as they are experienced, in conjunction with related discussions on sensuous perception, memory, fantasy and time consciousness, which pioneered a phenomenological tradition that went on to explore the senses, emotions, and the ontological constitution of the body as space, time and the cultural-historical (Moran, 2017, pp. 273-74). In his discussion of the body, Husserl distinguished between the physical or material inanimate body (Körper) and the animate body as we live it (Leib). Moran (2013) summarises them thus:
Körper (from the Latin corpus; literally: ‘body’) represents the body as a physical, material, extended thing in the natural world, subject to all the natural laws and causal interactions with other bodies. It is the body as located in time and space governed by causation, movement, and so on. The English word ‘corpse’ captures well the idea of the inanimate body which is simply a piece of the material, extended world. Leib signifies the animate, living body, the living organism, the body which is experienced in a specifically subjective, first-person way. The difference between accidentally falling out a window, entirely under the control of gravity, and jumping out a window illustrates clearly the difference between Körper and Leib. (p. 293)
By ‘first-person’, Husserl meant that the Leib is to be understood as the individual’s locus of experience (Moran, 2012, pp. 159-61) where phenomena unfold or appear, and to which the individual ‘holds sway’ (walten) at the same time (Heinämaa, 2004, p. 542; Moran, 2012, pp. 158-62)—a centre of capacities and agency that allows for a ‘unitary sense and voluntary control’ (Moran, 2013, p. 293). In phenomenology, this process that describes how sense perception unfolds for the subject to form a ‘bodily person in the world’ is called ‘embodiment’ (Heinämaa, 2004, p. 535). Furthermore, following Husserl, French phenomenologists such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty drew on this concept and parallelly distinguished between ‘body’ (le corps) and ‘own body’ (le corps propre) or ‘flesh’ (la chair) (Moran, 2017, p. 277), before proceeding to describe the experience of ‘being a body’ in greater detail.
At the outset, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty argue that the philosophical tradition before Husserl misunderstood the body and maintain that it is only by first understanding the nuances between the two ontological dimensions of the body that further investigation into its nature can be made meaningful. Sartre believes that the body is misunderstood primarily because the ‘orders of knowing and the orders of being have been conflated or inverted’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 43), and he criticises those who prioritise the physically observable body over the experience of being a body for ‘the basis of all understanding’ as having put the cart before the horse, or more specifically, ‘the corpse at the origin of the living body’ (Sartre, 2003, p. 344). Contrary to the scientist who treats the body as a mere object or instrument among others, instead of saying ‘I have a body’, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty insist on saying ‘I am my body’ (Moran, 2010a, p. 183; 2017, p. 277).
In this essay, we will attempt to understand the concept of embodiment in phenomenology, particularly in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. To achieve this, we will first borrow Sartre’s ontological framework of the body to inquire into the nature of the ‘intuited’ or ‘phenomenal’ body, mainly focusing on his notions of the body ‘for Itself’ and the body ‘for the Other’, before we proceed to compare and contrast their respective views on related topics such as sense perception and intentionality, world-horizon and intersubjectivity.
The Ontological Dimensions of the Body
In his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, Sartre proposes that the body be understood in three ontological levels (in descending order of fundamentality): the body ‘for Itself’, the body ‘for the Other’, and the body ‘for Itself as known by the Other’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 43). In this first section of the essay, we will examine the first ontological dimension of the body (i.e. ‘for Itself’) by first contrasting it to the second ontological dimension (i.e. ‘for the Other’) before we attempt to understand their differences and the relationship that connects them. The third ontological dimension of the body (i.e. ‘for Itself as known by the Other’) will only be addressed in the essay’s final section when we discuss intersubjectivity.
According to Sartre, the first two ontological dimensions of the body are ‘incommunicable’ and ‘irreconcilable’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 43). Referring to the body (‘for Itself’), Sartre (2003) asserts that it is either an object among other objects or it is that by which objects are revealed to the subject (p. 304) and pronounced that ‘the body is the psychic object par excellence—the only psychic object’ (p. 347). Such assertions by Sartre by no means equate to the denial of the body as a physical or material object that is perceivable by others, but what Sartre does insist is that ‘[the] scientific map of the body structure, while it is superimposed on the felt body, does not necessarily coincide with the body as felt’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 45). This view is shared by Merleau-Ponty (2012) as he writes:
I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, inspect them, and walk around them. But when it comes to my body, I never observe it itself. I would need a second body to be able to do so, which would itself be unobservable. (p. 93)
What is for Sartre the body ‘for Itself’ (or ‘intuited body’), or for Merleau-Ponty, the ‘phenomenal body’ fundamentally cannot be objectified and can only be experienced ambiguously (Moran, 2010b, p. 46). Crucially, Sartre argues that our attention most often rests not on this ambiguous ‘inner perception’ of the body but on the world. As such, the first ontological dimension of embodiment describes the body as that which is not primarily determined by its position in space and time or by physical properties but rather by the unique way in which individuals ‘hold (it) sway’. Our bodies are distinguished by the distinct ways in which they move, gesture, and act in response to the surrounding environment (Heinämaa, 2004, p. 539). In summarising Husserl’s description of the body, Zahavi (2003) writes:
The body is characterized as being present in any perceptual experience as the zero point, as the indexical ‘here’ in relation to which the object is oriented. It is the center around which and in relation to which (egocentric) space unfolds itself (Hua 11/298, 4/159, 9/392). Husserl consequently argues that the body is a condition of the possibility for the perception of and interaction with spatial objects (Hua 14/540), and that every worldly experience is mediated by and made possible by our embodiment (Hua 6/220, 4/56, 5/124). (pp. 98-99)
For Husserl and the phenomenologists after him, the living body is the centre of our experiences and the means of perceiving the world: a literal and figurative ‘organ of perception’ (Moran, 2012, p. 160). For Sartre, it is a living and functioning tool that, in typical situations, does not draw attention to itself (p. 160). With the body ‘for Itself’, the second ontological dimension of the body ‘for the Other’ gets simultaneously disclosed, which Sartre describes as having two main aspects: first, as the ‘objective’ body that represents the standard model in scientific studies, and second, in mediating the instrumentality of objects in the world, acting as a tool (as hands, eyes and so on) among tools (Moran, 2010b, p. 46).
In the first instance, it is by regarding the body as a mere object among objects that its indexicality becomes suspended (Zahavi, 2003, p. 102). Zahavi gives us the example of moving through space, in which we often forget that the body is the reference point to our absolute ‘here’. Instead, we perceive an abstract world with its objective coordinates (p. 102), as if the objects out ‘there’ in the world can exist independently of the body that makes them possible. Furthermore, he quotes Husserl to explain that this mistake occurs when we attempt to locate the felt sensation or perception of touch with the visual perception of the body’s movement, overlooking that the experience of a ‘gesture’ is more fundamentally rooted in the former, to which he further writes: ‘[s]pace is experienced precisely as the hand’s field of mobility’ (p. 103). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty provides an illustration of ‘touch’ that highlights the instrumentality of the body in greater detail. He emphasises that ‘touch’ brings the body and the world into literal contact with one another, unlike ‘sight’, which gives us the sense that we are ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 57):
Tactile experience, however, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot spread it out before ourselves and it does not fully become an object. Correlatively, as the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself as being everywhere and nowhere, here I cannot forget that it is through my body that I go toward the world… (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 330)
In contrast to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty highlights the similarities and continuities between touch and vision, which are usually viewed as contrasting in terms of their role in constituting materiality and spatiality (Moran, 2010b, p. 57). While it is commonly believed that ‘touch’ disappears when we lift our hand off a surface before touching another, Merleau-Ponty argues that an indefinite sense of touch persists. He calls this sense of touch a ‘tactile space without matter, that is, a tactile background’ instead of a ‘tactile nothingness’ (p. 57). According to Merleau-Ponty (2012), our understanding of the space around us is tied to our sense of co-existence with that space. This idea finds support in the famous case of Schneider, who could locate a mosquito bite through ‘touch’ but failed to locate the same spot when asked to point at it (pp. 105-06). The latter is an ‘abstract’ movement that requires a second-order cognitive process utilising objective spatial coordinates, whereas the former is a ‘concrete’ movement that is enabled simply through our embodied sense of space and immediate engagement with the lived environment (Moran, 2018, p. 594; Reuter, 1999, pp. 73-74). Therefore, this example demonstrates that the instrumentality of the body takes precedence over its physicality in space and time.
Referring to the embodied experience in general, Sartre (2003) claims that ‘the body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the world is the total situation of the for-itself [i.e. consciousness] and the measure of its existence’ (p. 309). This perspective is shared by Merleau-Ponty (2012), who further describes the relationship between the body and the world thus: ‘To see is to enter into a universe of beings that show themselves, and they could not show themselves if they could not also be hidden behind each other or behind me. In other words, to see an object is to come to inhabit it…’ (pp. 70-71). Moran (2010b) summarises their views brilliantly through an illustration: ‘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.’ (p. 49). Put differently, there exists an irreducible duality of ‘self’-world, which are two aspects of the same structure in our embodied experience of ‘being in a world’ (Landes, 2015, p. 341; Wilkerson, 2013, p. 304): a world of perception because there is a body to which they appear and, simultaneously, a body that is the contingent viewpoint on the world (Moran, 2010b, p. 53; 2011, p. 19). By citing Husserl, Zahavi (2003) provides additional insight into the intricate relationship of the body and the world:
Although the kinaesthetic experiences are not interpreted as belonging to the perceived object, and although they do not themselves constitute objects, they manifest bodily self-givenness and, thereby, a unity and framework that the perceptual appearances are correlated with (Hua 11/14), and which furnish them with a coherence allowing them to gain object-reference and become appearances of something (Hua 4/66, 16/159, 6/109). One might, consequently, say that perceptual intentionality presupposes a moving and therefore incarnated subject (Hua 16/176). In short, the crucial point made by Husserl is not that we can perceive movement, but that our very perception presupposes movement. (p. 100)
To paraphrase, from an ontological perspective, the ‘objective’ body that is publicly observable in the world of perception is subordinated to the more fundamental ‘invisible’ phenomenal body, in which the latter is synonymous with the capacity for intuitive movement and control that thus defines its instrumentality. This, in turn, highlights the structural priority of the body ‘for Itself’ in comparison to the body ‘for the Other’.
As we conclude this section, we can see that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have not had any significant disagreements regarding the body ‘for Itself’ through their respective descriptions of the ‘phenomenal’ or ‘intuited’ body. In the upcoming section of the essay, however, we will briefly discuss Husserl’s concept of the ‘double sensation’ and examine their differences. While Merleau-Ponty acknowledges this phenomenon, Sartre disputes it. By reviewing their viewpoints, we will gain a deeper understanding of how sense perception and intentionality relate to the concept of embodiment in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
Sense Perception and Intentionality
According to Husserl, when we move or feel something with our hand, or feel pain in our ankle or back, we localise these sensations in different parts of our body (Zahavi, 2003, p. 103). However, this localisation process doesn’t yet make us aware of our body as an object. When we touch a table with our hand and focus on the sensation, we become aware of our hand as the experiencing organ, not as an object being experienced. But this changes when our body objectifies itself. For instance, when we look at our foot or when one hand touches the other, we experience the visually and tactually appearing body as the exteriority of our own body (p. 103). Referring to Husserl’s account of the ‘double sensation’, Zahavi (2003) writes:
If we examine the case of the right hand touching the left hand, the touching hand feels the surface of the touched hand. But when the left hand is touched, it is not simply given as a mere object, since it feels the touch itself (Hua 4/145). … The decisive difference between touching one’s own body and everything else, be it inanimate objects or the body of Others, is, consequently, that it implies a double-sensation. (pp. 103-04)
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Husserl’s writings heavily influenced Merleau-Ponty, particularly in terms of the phenomenological principle in which the subject and object are correlated a priori in an inseparable way (Moran, 2010a, p. 178). In Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) own words, the subject and object are ‘two abstract moments of a unique structure, namely, presence’ (pp. 454-55). While both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty assert that the body is continuously ‘felt’ in all cases of perceiving, Sartre disagrees with this view and argues that our perceptions objectify and externalise what we perceive, distancing us from ourselves and that our sight and touch provide us with a perception of our body in the same way as it is perceived by another (Moran, 2010b, p. 47).
For Sartre, we cannot feel the sensitivity of our own hand or even the sense of appropriation (i.e. ownership or ‘mineness’) that we have with regard to it (Moran, 2010b, pp. 46-47). He says: ‘[f]or my hand reveals to me the resistance of objects, their hardness or softness, but not itself’ (Sartre, 2003, p. 304). As Sartre himself illustrates, when we’re chasing a tram, we are only conscious of a tram-having-to-be-overtaken and nothing else: ‘[t]here is a tram to be caught; a road surface to be walked, and so on’ (Moran, 2010b, p. 50). In other words, we experience all instrumentalities because we have a body, and yet we do not encounter our own body; we only encounter objects to be lifted, walked on, etc. (p. 50). Sartre’s idea is that our body is usually present to us in this way (Moran, 2010b, p. 47; 2012, p. 160) and that it only becomes noticeable when something goes wrong, such as a stiff neck or a blister on a finger (Moran, 2012, p. 160). Therefore, Sartre (2003) concludes that the phenomenon of the ‘double sensation’ is not a necessary aspect of being embodied but rather something contingent. He suggests that this sensation can be significantly reduced or even eliminated by using morphine, which numbs the body and makes it insensitive to touch (p. 304).
Despite their disagreement, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the body is the essential medium (in the world) through which perceptual experience (of the world) unfolds for the subject (Moran, 2010b, p. 50; 2018, p. 581). Put differently, they assert that consciousness is an active engagement with the world that doesn’t necessarily entail explicit self-awareness, and that reflective self-consciousness is not a part of our original, ‘unreflected’ or ‘pre-reflective’ conscious engagement with the world (Moran, 2010b, p. 50; 2018, p. 581). To this point, Merleau-Ponty adopts Husserl’s concept of ‘operative intentionality’ (fungierende Intentionalität), which is a non-objective and pre-reflective intentionality towards the lived world (Moran, 2018, p. 594; Reuter, 1999, pp. 70-72). He insists that our bodily intentions lead us into a world that is already ‘given’ before we even conceptually encounter it in cognition (Landes, 2015, p. 341; Moran, 2010a, p. 179; 2018, p. 594; Reuter, 1999, p. 77):
My personal existence must be the taking up of a pre-personal tradition. There is, then, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am there, and who marks out my place in that world. This captive or natural mind is my body, not the momentary body that is the instrument of my personal choices and that focuses upon some world, but rather the system of anonymous “functions” that wraps each particular focusing into a general project. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 265)
Put otherwise, the body is not something that is first given and after which we use to explore the world. Rather, the world is presented to us through bodily exploration, and we come to know our body through this experience (Landes, 2015, pp. 341-42). In summary, for Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the body is our mode of being in the world, and it comports itself intentionally towards a perceptual world that is always already imbued with significance (Moran, 2017, p. 273; 2018, p. 594).
As we conclude this section, it is worth highlighting the distinction between the body ‘for Itself’ and the body ‘for the Other’ (or ‘thematised’ body) to clarify their foundational relationship. The body’s original awareness is not an experience of itself as a spatial object. Rather, the phenomenon of self-objectification is a secondary function that shares the same nature as any other perceptual experience, which is contingent on an unthematic bodily comportment (Zahavi, 2003, p. 101). For Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is an incompletely constituted entity, and its constitution is always an ongoing and unfinished process (Moran, 2017, p. 275). In the final section of the essay, we will seek to comprehend the ‘ongoing and unfinished’ process of our embodiment through the idea of world-horizon, during which discussion we will encounter and examine the phenomenon of intersubjectivity. Lastly, we will evaluate the perspectives of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on these topics.
World-Horizon and Intersubjectivity
The concept of intentionality in Husserlian phenomenology suggests that all human (conscious) behaviour, including perceptual, emotional, and cognitive activities, are meaning-establishing or ‘sense-giving’ (Sinngebung or sinngebend) (Moran, 2017, p. 272; Reuter, 1999, p. 80). Essentially, every mental act we perform—whether we are aware of it or not—, such as perceiving, judging, hoping, fearing, or loving, is directed towards an object, whether ‘real’ (as perceivable by the five senses) or ‘imaginary’ (mental object or image) (Crossley, 2001, p. 101; Moran, 2017, p. 272; Reuter, 1999, p. 72). This object-directedness informs the intending act and determines the manner in which the object presents itself to us, which Husserl calls the ‘mode of givenness’ (Gegebenheitsweise) (Moran, 2017, p. 272; 2018, p. 585; Reuter, 1999, p. 75). In the experience of seeing a wardrobe, for example, there is the fulfilment of an intention that results in its front view being given in perception, while other ‘absent’ profiles of the wardrobe, such as its backside and bottom, are currently hidden. According to Husserl, these ‘absent’ profiles are co-intended with the ‘actually given’ profile, such that we get to apprehend its three-dimensionality (Crossley, 2001, p. 108; Zahavi, 2003, p. 100). The perceptual experience is not only about the conviction ‘I can’ or the recognition of our physical ability to move our eyes or adjust our head but also about experiencing an ‘evolving sensory panorama’ as an essential feature of the object perceived (Moran, 2010a, p. 191). As such, the ‘actually given’ profile of an object is associated with a particular bodily position, while its absent profiles are associated with the body’s capacity for possible movement—if we walk past the wardrobe, for example, it is its front side that becomes hidden (Zahavi, 2003, p. 100).
The totality of absent profiles of a ‘given’ or manifested object is what forms the backdrop of its ‘possible givens’ (Zahavi, 2003, p. 100). While the early Husserl focused on investigating the intentional nature of a given object, the mature Husserl (followed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) further explores this theme in relation to the question of human embodiment, including the apprehension of backgrounds, contexts, ‘horizons’, and the ambiguous yet authentic experience of the ‘world’ that surpasses all conceivable experiences (Moran, 2017, p. 273; 2018, p. 581). Thus, for the phenomenologist, object-intentionality is accompanied by horizon-intentionality (Moran, 2018, p. 581) and our bodily comportment always takes place against the background of “an ever-present, meaning-loaded ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) [or ‘world-horizon’], a lifeworld whose ‘horizonality’ outruns all possible intentions and which is also always experienced in a unified manner” (Moran, 2017, p. 273). In Sartre’s (2003) terminology, the body transcends itself in the act of intending toward the world, making it a ‘transcendence-transcended’ (p. 347). Merleau-Ponty (2012) writes:
Even if I am absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensations, I do not achieve a complete suppression of every reference to the world that is included in my life; at each moment some new intention springs forth from me, whether it be toward the objects that surround me and fall before my eyes, or toward the instants that arrive and push back into the past that I have just lived through. I never fully become an object in the world; the fullness of being of a thing is always lacking for me, my own substance always runs away from me through the inside, and some intention is always sketched out. (p. 168)
To grasp Merleau-Ponty’s expression, it is imperative to attempt to recognise it within our own experience. In the opening chapter of The Sphere of Attention, Arvidson (2006) presents a clear everyday example that illuminates the ‘structure’ of perceptual experience (pp. 1-2), which I summarise:
First thing in the morning, I head downstairs to let my dog outside. I sit on the doorstep and watch him play in the yard. When we focus on something, we do it within a specific context. In this case, my focus is on my dog within the context of the yard. However, there is also a larger context: the world around us. We are only aware of it in a peripheral way, as we are mainly focused on the dog and the yard. Thus, there are three dimensions to our attention: thematic attention (attention in the dimension of theme or focus), the context of attention (consciousness in the dimension of thematic context), and the margin of attention (consciousness in the dimension of margin as halo or horizon). The dog is the main focus (theme), the yard is the context, and the world and our embodied existences are the margin [i.e. world-horizon]. The [world-horizon] plays a crucial role in human subjectivity.
Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes the world as the natural milieu and the field of all thoughts and perception (p. lxxiv). He insists that ‘all knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception’ (p. 215). For Merleau-Ponty, all consciousness, including self-consciousness, is perceptual (Moran, 2010a, p. 182), and the transcendental field where the egoic subject resides is accessible only through a second-order reflection upon the phenomenal field where it is rooted (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 65). Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phenomenal field’ is none other than Husserl’s world-horizon, which is the ‘wherein’ of our being in the world and where we encounter other embodied existences, i.e. the phenomenon of intersubjectivity.
In discussing intersubjectivity, we find two different conceptions put forth by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. However, let us first establish what they agree on. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, following the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, accord that the ‘[world-horizon] necessarily presupposes the intrinsic individuality of consciousnesses’ (Heinämaa, 2004, p. 539). At the same time, despite this alignment, their respective descriptions of how the phenomenon of intersubjectivity is determined are in contradistinction to one another.
For Merleau-Ponty, our apprehension of the existence of other embodied beings in their physical manifestations (as material bodies) is derived from the apperception of our very own embodiment, since he regards the latter to be more fundamental (Heinämaa, 2004, p. 542; Moran, 2012, p. 162). Referring to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity, Heinämaa (2004) writes:
The other body is grasped as living when the primitive sense of living, as sensing, as constituted in my own case, is transferred over from my own body to another corporeal body in the environing space (Husserl 1950: 142– 3/ 112– 13; 1952: 164– 6/ 172– 4; 1973a: 97, 126). The transfer is motivated by the similarity of perceived movements. Some things that I detect and observe in space resemble my own living body and its sensory organs in their perceived movements (Husserl 1950: 141– 4/ 112– 14; 1973a: 3– 4; 1973b: 183; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1960: 286/ 233; Ricoeur 1967: 46– 7). A body over there reacts to external stimulation in the same way as my own arms and hands. And when it bumps into another thing, it does not halt or bounce back but “restores” its balance and circumvents the obstacle (Husserl 1973a: 118). Moreover, without any detectable causal influence by other material elements or things, it “spontaneously” turns in this or that direction. And finally: It also manifests the type of “reflexive” movement that is familiar to me from my own case. (p. 543)
Indeed, the above description is analogous to the concept of the ‘double sensation’, as discussed in the previous section. According to Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenon of the ‘double sensation’ is inherent to all our five sensory modalities, which unison is what he later calls the ‘chiasm’ (le chiasme) or entwinement of the ‘flesh’ (la chair) or the activity of ‘sensing’ (le sentir) as a whole (Moran, 2013, p. 301). For the mature Merleau-Ponty, it is this that discloses the world-horizon where the phenomenon of intersubjectivity takes place.
As a matter of fact, Sartre (2003) was the originator of the concept of ‘flesh’, and similar to Husserl’s notion of Leib, he considers it to be the ‘pure contingency of presence’ (p. 343) or ‘facticity’—the undeniable presence of the body in the public world that is beyond our control—where intercorporeity is possible (Moran, 2010b, p. 42). In fact, the idea of ‘intertwining’ is also present in Sartre’s ‘flesh’, although it carries a very different significance, if not opposite to Merleau-Ponty’s. Sartre’s notion of ‘intertwining’ with regard to the ‘flesh’ refers us once again to the irreconcilability of the body ‘for Itself’ and the body ‘for the Other’, ‘the complex double-sidedness of self-presence and self-distantiation within the ego itself’ (Moran, 2013, p. 296). For Sartre (2003), it is only through interacting with the Other that my flesh is revealed to me:
The caress reveals the Other’s flesh as flesh to myself and to the Other. But it reveals this flesh in a very special way. To take hold of the Other reveals to her her inertia and her passivity as a transcendence-transcended; but this is not to caress her. In the caress it is not my body as a synthetic form in action which caresses the Other; it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born. The caress is designed to cause the Other’s body to be born, through pleasure, for the Other—and for myself—as a touched passivity in such a way that my body is made flesh in order to touch the Other’s body with its own passivity; that is, by caressing itself with the Other’s body rather than by caressing her. (p. 390)
In simpler terms, Sartre disagrees with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the Other’s body being constituted based on the ‘inner perception’ or apperception of our own body, as he considers self-perception to be an act of self-objectification that presupposes us already being in the ‘gaze of the Other’, in which the Other must already be present as an ‘object’ to us (Moran, 2010b, p. 44). According to Sartre, even though we may feel a profound sense of ownership over our body when we see and touch its different parts, we are actually experiencing it from an external perspective, which he refers to as ‘the point of view of an Other’ (p. 46):
…I am the Other in relation to my eye. I apprehend it as a sense organ constituted in the world in a particular way, but I can not “see the seeing;” that is, I can not apprehend it in the process of revealing an aspect of the world to me. (Sartre, 2003, p. 304)
Thus, to account for the phenomenon of intersubjectivity, Sartre (2003) conceptualises a third ontological dimension of embodiment that he calls the body ‘for Itself as known by the Other’ (p. 351), which encompasses both the dimension of facticity and the intersubjective dimension (Moran, 2011, p. 13). In other words, for Sartre, we experience our body as it is perceived by others, and this perception is influenced by various factors in our concrete relations with them (pp. 13-14). Essentially, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agree on the fundamentality of the first ontological dimension of the body (i.e. the ‘for Itself’ or ‘phenomenal’ body) but disagree on how it relates to the Other in the constitution of intersubjectivity, based on their distinct notions of ‘entwinement’ with regard to sense perception.
Conclusion
In this essay, we have discussed how Sartre and Merleau-Ponty build on Husserl’s distinction between the body as a material object (Körper) and as it is lived (Leib). By first borrowing Sartre’s tripartite ontological framework of embodiment—the body ‘for Itself’, ‘for the Other’, and ‘for Itself as known by the Other’—we learnt that both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agree on the significance of the body ‘for Itself’ (‘intuited’ or ‘phenomenal’ body) as that which fundamentally cannot be objectified since it is constituted not by its position in space and time but by its unique characteristic of holding-sway. Furthermore, we examined Schneider’s case and delved into the topic of sense perception and intentionality. Through this discussion, we discovered that the body’s instrumentality—i.e. our sense of embodied space and interaction with the lived environment—is primarily determined by the body’s operative intentionality.
Moreover, we saw that for Merleau-Ponty, the body’s operative intentionality is comportment towards a pre-personal world, which is equivalent to Sartre’s notion of the body as a ‘transcendence-transcended’ where pre-reflective consciousness is necessarily grounded. We have also seen how object-intentionality is always accompanied by horizon-intentionality as determined by the absent profiles of objects given in perception, which forms the backdrop of ‘possible givens’ or ‘horizon’ where intersubjectivity takes place. Lastly, we understood that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty mainly disagree about the possibility of ‘inner perception’ or apperception of our own body from ‘within’. Whereas Merleau-Ponty considers the phenomenon of the ‘double sensation’ to be an inherent feature of sense perception, Sartre insists that it is contingent and secondary, if not fundamentally impossible. Their disagreement also transpires in their opposing conception of ‘entwinement’ with regard to the ‘flesh’, which makes plain their divergent view on how intersubjectivity is constituted.
Although this essay has examined various aspects of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment and intersubjectivity, there is still much room for further research in this field. One area that requires clarification is the relationship between the body as a whole and its parts (i.e. ‘sense organs’). Additionally, future research can delve deeper into the relationship between attention and awareness—in regard to ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ objects—within the context of embodied subjectivity. Furthermore, the research can investigate the relationship between subjectivity and embodiment, particularly in regard to the sense of appropriation (i.e. ownership or ‘mineness’) of one’s body.
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