Sartre’s own bad-faith example presupposes a body-mind dualism his ontology denies

Evidence

Th e body makes its fi rst appearance in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as he discusses the concept of bad faith. To illustrate how one may be in bad faith, he describes the situation of a woman at a romantic rendezvous. Th e man grabs her hand, and she abandons it to him: “but she does not notice that she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect… . And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion— neither consenting nor resisting— a thing” (BN, 97). If Sartre was a self-proclaimed Cartesian dualist and had presented the for-itself as an amalgam of mind and body, two radically diff erent substances, this example would not come as a surprise. It would indeed be possible for the woman to divorce herself from her own body. However, Sartre claims that the for-itself is its body. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 96

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies bad faith and the body-as-facticity / consciousness-as-transcendence distinction in Being and Nothingness.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre rejects the Cartesian split of free will from determined passions — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1078; Sartre denies any phenomenal-noumenal distinction in being; Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 63 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities #complicates (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 63
• Sartre’s own writings drift from lived body toward instrumental body #complicates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 99