A person’s mode of engaging a surface changes how that surface phenomenologically appears.

Evidence

Sartre preferred skiing, and that experience also found its way into Being and Nothingness. Walking over a snowfield is hard work, he pointed out, but skiing over it is a delight. The snow itself changes underneath you, phenomenologically speaking; instead of presenting itself as viscous and clinging, it becomes hard and smooth. It bears you up, and you slide flowingly over it, as easily as the notes of Nausea’s jazz song. He added that he was curious about waterskiing, a new invention which he had heard of but not tried. Even on snow, you left a line of ski marks behind you; in water, you left nothing. That was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 390

Categorization

• DEFINE: The skiing/walking contrast is a clean example of how practical engagement, not just perception, shapes the phenomenological object.
• XREF: connects to: Skiing transforms snow through the skier’s activity into meaningful lived terrain — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1359; Tools and surroundings are grasped through the ends they serve, not in themselves; An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 215 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Motion alters a quality’s mode of being rather than its essence #expands (0.85)
• Humans can shift between contemplation and participation within their own minds. #expands (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 232