In this vein, we find Sartre’s motivations to explicitly reject the principle of ‘double-sensation’ as held by the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. At another moment in the story, in Cartesian fashion, Roquentin begins to perceive his hands as a cold object full of dead weight below and against his human consciousness, i.e., his mind. In disgust, Roquentin tries ardently to tear the flesh off of his face. In his novel Nausea, for instance, Sartre provides a scene in which the protagonist Roquentin is seen looking in the mirror and anxiously questioning his embodied schema. Therefore, in his texts concerning the body, not surprisingly, he writes as a kind of dualist in the sense that he sees the body as something to transcend, surpass, or ‘get out of’. He himself struggled with physical disability throughout his life. Sartre’s attitude towards the body is slightly ambivalent. My overall conclusion is that Sartre’s understanding of the body is posited as a source of ontological contestation so long as we live in a social world. I will provide an interpretation of each dimension, thus, showing how they are interrelated with one another as well as form a larger picture of embodied existence.

Fundamentally, for Sartre, there are three ontological dimensions of embodiment: the body for Itself, the body for the Other, and the body for Itself as known by the Other.

Then, I will use Sartre’s section “The Body” in Being and Nothingness to examine his philosophical definition of embodiment in particular. To begin, I will provide a background of Sartre’s literary attitude towards the body as well as his general phenomenological approach. My essay will be structured in the following manner. Indeed, it is my understanding that Sartre’s philosophy is a valuable cornerstone for accomplishing both of these perspectives. Secondly, by examining Sartre’s phenomenological approach we are also better equipped to distinguish between ideas of the body that persist in the religious discourse (i.e., the French Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel) versus ones that are grounded in non-religious presuppositions.

Firstly, by understanding Sartre’s philosophical investigation of the body we can begin to see the diversity of thought that composes the question of embodiment within the twentieth century French existential tradition. This shift in interest is important for two reasons.

In keeping with the theme of embodiment found in my essay of the April Issue of Epoché (2021), I will now move to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding of the body.

Sartre being