Even mental undressing of another requires literally incarnating oneself.
Evidence
Yet there too the expression is not a happy one, for I can be embarrassed only by a concrete thing which is presented inside my universe and which hinders me as I try to use other tools. Here the embarrassment is more subtle, for what constrains me is absent. I never encounter my body-for-the-Other as an obstacle; on the contrary, it is because the body is never there, because it remains inapprehensible that it can be constraining. I seek to reach it, to master it, by making use of it as an instrument—since it is also given as an instrument in a world—in order to give it the form and the attitude which are appropriate. But it is on principle out of reach, and all the acts which I perform in order to appropriate it to myself escape me in turn and are fixed at a distance from me as my body-for-the-Other. Thus I forever act “blindly,” shoot at a venture without ever knowing the results of my shooting. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 916 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Access to another’s being requires their self-knowledge, which is impossible; Expression requires a closed individual self, which paradoxically isolates that self completely.; The body-for-the-Other constrains precisely because it can never be grasped — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 916
Broader Connections
- The body-for-the-Other constrains precisely because it can never be grasped
#expands(0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 916 - Expression requires a closed individual self, which paradoxically isolates that self completely.
#expands(0.70)