The body’s action on matter reveals qualities that already dwell latent within it
Evidence
While it exists, it effects in the material the birth of a deep quality which lives only so long as the speed exists, a sort of reassembling which conquers its indifferent exteriority and which falls back like a blade of glass behind the moving slider. The informing unification and synthetic condensation of the field of snow, which masses itself into an instrumental organization, which is utilized, like the hammer or the anvil, and which docilely adapts itself to an action which understands it and fulfills it; a continued and creative action on the very matter of the snow; the solidification of the snowy mass by the sliding; the similarity of the snow to the water which gives support, docile and without memory, or to the naked body of the woman, which the caress leaves intact and troubled in its inmost depths—such is the action of the skier on the real. But at the same time the snow remains impenetrable and out of reach; in one sense the action of the skier only develops its potentialities. The skier makes it produce what it can produce; the homogeneous, solid matter releases for him a solidity and homogeneity only through the act of the sportsman, but this solidity and this homogeneity dwell as properties enclosed in the matter. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1361
Categorization
- DEFINE: Capsules Sartre’s account of how freedom draws out, rather than fabricates, the qualities of the in-itself — action actualizes potentialities already enclosed in matter.
- XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity on how freedom is exercised on a resisting world rather than created ex nihilo, and to Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction. — connects to: The psychic body gives psychic phenomena a substrate of contingency grounded in materiality.; Action modifies the being of things, not just their appearance; The intellect’s capacity to receive and give form originates its plasticity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 401
Broader Connections
- Action modifies the being of things, not just their appearance
#expands(0.85) - The intellect’s capacity to receive and give form originates its plasticity
#expands(0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 401