JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

222Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsSartre’s phenomenology of the body is a description of the asymmetrieswhich obtain between one’s own body, the body that I am, and the bodies ofothers: the bodies I may observe or encounter in a third person way. My ownbody is not for me a thing. It is a thing from the perspective of another, andanother’s body is a thing from my perspective, but my own body is notpresented to me as an object in the world; as something I could encounteror straightforwardly observe.Sartre is not denying that each of us experiences his own body. I have alimited visual perspective onto the front of my body from the shouldersdownwards. However, I can not see my own head and back. I also have akinaesthetic awareness of the relative positions of the parts of my body, butnot of their locations in the world.As subject the body cannot be object and as object the body cannot besubject. For example, the eyes that are seeing can not see themselves.Although I can see using my eyes I can not see my seeing. There could bea human being, or an operation on a human being, such that one of the twoeyes could watch the other while the other watched objects in the world.Nevertheless, in such a case, I am adopting the standpoint of the other inrelation to one of my eyes. The eye that sees still does not see the eye thatsees.Similarly, my hand may touch objects in the world, and I may touch one ofmy hands with the other. However, my hand can not touch itself, or, at least,the part that is touching is not touching itself. Sartre says ‘we are dealingwith two essentially different orders of reality. To touch and to be touched’(Being and Nothingness, p. 304). Always, being the subject of an experienceprecludes being simultaneously the object of that same experience.We see here a new level on which being-for-itself and being in itself areincommensurable. My body as I experience it is pour-soi. My body asexperienced by another is en-soi. There are not two numerically distinctbodies, but there are two radically distinct modes of being exhibited by oneand the same body: subjective and objective, free and mechanical, livedand observed.This is a dualism of perspectives, not a dualism of entities. Thephenomenology of the human body derived from being one is radicallydistinct from that derived from observing one, encountering one as a thingin the external world.