Perceiving one’s own body as an object converts its lived possibilities into dead-possibilities

Evidence

Our perceptions also tend to be accompanied by that strange sense called ‘proprioception’ - the sense that tells us whether our legs are crossed or our head is cocked to one side. My own body is not an object like others; it is me. If I sit down with my knitting, says Merleau-Ponty, I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don’t hunt for my hands and fingers. And if I rest my arm on the table, ‘I will never think to say that it is next to the ashtray in the same way that the ashtray is next to the telephone.’ Our proprioception is exquisitely sensitive and complex: If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 733 (#epitomizes, via linked claim)

Now it might seem at first thought that this position would involve an infinite regress. For if the Cartesian cogito reflects not on itself but on the pre-reflective consciousness, then in order for there to be self-consciousness, it might seem that we should need a cogito for the Cartesian cogito, another for this cogito and so on ad infinitum. But this would be the case only if self-consciousness required that the self be posited as an object, and Sartre denies that this is so. The very nature of consciousness is such, he says, that for it, to be and to know itself are one and the same. (p. 112) Consciousness of an object is consciousness of being consciousness of an object. Thus by nature all consciousness is self-consciousness, but by this Sartre does not mean that the self is necessarily posited as an object. When I am aware of a chair, I am non-reflectively conscious of my awareness. But when I deliberately think of my awareness, this is a totally new act of consciousness; and here only am I explicitly positing my awareness or myself as an object of reflection. The pre-reflective cogito is a non-positional self-consciousness. Sartre uses the words conscience non-positionelle (de) soi and puts the de in parentheses to show that there is no separation, no positing of the self as an object of consciousness. Similarly he speaks of it as a non-thetic self-consciousness. Thetic or positional self-consciousness is conscience de soi in which consciousness deliberately reflects upon its own acts and states and in so far as is possible posits itself as an object. The Cartesian cogito, of course, belongs to the second order. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 10 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The perceived object is always surpassed toward the self’s own possibilities; Perceiving another person’s body differs fundamentally from perceiving objects; Self-consciousness need not posit the self as an object — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 10 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Perceiving another person’s body differs fundamentally from perceiving objects #expands (0.85)
• One’s own body is lived as self, not experienced as an object. #epitomizes (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 733
• Self-consciousness need not posit the self as an object #complicates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 10
• Loss of proprioception reduces one’s self to an abstract Cartesian ghost #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 736
• Being-towards-death frames mortality as the source of authentic existence #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 933