Body and Nothingness

For Sartre, there are two fundamental subjective dimensions--Being-for-itself and Being-for-others. In more familiar terms, the former is self-consciousness and the latter is the Body qua object for others. Hence, subjective physical activity has no Ontological status for Sartre, and, so, is a glaring Nothingness in his scheme. However, Sartre does not regard himself as aligned with the long tradition that holds that the Body is non-existent or illusory. So, he struggles to fill in that gap with locutions such as 'the lived body' to express one's active physical nature. Still, that approach encounters a difficulty because, for Sartre, on the one hand, Space is fundamentally 'hodological', i. e. the organization of the instrumentality of objects that Heidegger calls the 'ready-to-hand', while on the other, the Body is no such instrument, which amounts to the problematic denial of the spatiality of one's body. In contrast, in the alternative category that has been suggested her--Being-towards-others, one's physical dimension is at least active, with the 'towards' a generating of Space, i. e. between oneself and others. But, ultimately, so long as the phenomenological method takes as its fundamental distinction that between Consciousness and Phenomena, any classification of bodily phenomena must be as 'non-conscious', which even Merleau-Ponty does not seem to overcome.