For Sartre the body forms the inescapable background of all consciousness

Evidence

Sartre illustrates this with the example of reading with pain in the eyes. If I am reading while my eyes are in pain, the pain colors my experience of reading. I do not know my pain, I live it. My body is constantly present as me. I am not conscious of it, but as conscious, I exist as my body. “To be conscious is always to be conscious of the world, and the world and body are always present to my consciousness although in diff erent ways” (BN, 439–40). As I am reading with pain in my eyes, my body is always present; it forms the background of my consciousness, a painful one as my eyes hurt. I can pay attention to the pain and make it the focus of my experience, or I can focus on the reading itself. But even if I choose the latter, the pain is not expelled from my consciousness. If my body or one of its parts hurts, my consciousness is a hurtful consciousness. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Sartre’s lived-body concept: consciousness does not observe the body but exists as it, with pain as the paradigmatic case of a body that colors but never leaves awareness.
• XREF: This contradicts Beauvoir’s later emphasis on the body as situation and her critique of Sartre’s instrumentalism — the very tension this book’s thesis hinges on. — connects to: The body is a neglected, lateral structure that consciousness surpasses and nihilates; The body is apprehended non-thetically as fatigue while consciousness attends to the world; Sartre’s Nausea centers on a root’s opaque being overwhelming consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 83 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• For Sartre the body is a willed instrument that consciousness commands #contradicts (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 119
• Embodiment is the necessary contingent condition anchoring consciousness in the world for Sartre #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 97
• Sartre’s own writings drift from lived body toward instrumental body #complicates (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 99