Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, touch and the "double sensation'
pp. 41-66
in: Katherine J. Morris (ed), Sartre on the body, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
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'.
