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

Abstract

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’.