Being embodied is essential to existence, but no particular body structure is.
Evidence
Merleau-Ponty points out that human existence calls for revision of the notions of necessity and contingency. “Existence has no fortuitous attributes, no content which does not contribute towards giving it its form; it does not give admittance to any pure fact because it is the process by which facts are drawn up.” This is true. But it is also true that there are conditions without which the very fact of existence would seem to be impossible. Presence in the world vigorously implies the positing of a body that is both a thing of the world and a point of view on this world: but this body need not possess this or that particular structure. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 80
Categorization
- XREF: Sits between Merleau-Ponty’s situated body and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness — a subtle pushback at the existentialist doctrine that existence precedes essence, since Beauvoir concedes structural conditions. — connects to: The body is a permanent structure of being, not a contingent addition. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 870; The body is necessary to the for-itself yet manifests its contingency — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 839; One’s own body is lived as self, not experienced as an object. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 733 (+3 more)
- DEFINE: Defines the crucial existentialist distinction between conditions (necessary for existence) and particular structures (contingent)
Broader Connections
- Individual features are contingent forms of a necessary embodied existence
#corroborates(0.85) - Perceptual ambiguity is a necessary, unwilled structure of embodied existence.
#qualifies(0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 67