The body’s immobility as surpassed facticity is the pure in-itself

Evidence

It is nonetheless true that the psychic movement refers to two limits—the future terminus of its result, and the past terminus—the motionless organ which it alters and surpasses. I perceive the movement-of-the-arm as a perpetual, inapprehensible reference toward a past-being. This past-being (the arm, the leg, the whole body at rest) I do not see at all; I can never catch sight of it except through the movement which surpasses it and to which I am a presence—just as one gets a glimpse of a pebble at the bottom of the stream through the movement of the water. Yet this immobility of being which is always surpassed and never realized, to which I perpetually refer in order to say what is in motion—this is pure facticity, pure flesh, the pure in-itself as the past of a transcended transcendence which is perpetually being made past. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 906

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre’s definition of facticity/flesh/in-itself as the always-surpassed past of the transcending body — the ontology at the heart of this chapter.
• XREF: This is exactly the ‘facticity’ pole Beauvoir builds The Second Sex’s situation concept out of — the explicit reader goal. — connects to: Nausea reveals facticity through the body’s inescapable belonging to being; The human body remains contingent and superfluous even in decomposition.; Being-in-itself is full positivity, excluding all negation, becoming, and temporality. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 165 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘pebble at the bottom of the stream’ formulation — we only ever glimpse the body’s substance through the movement that surpasses it — is a dense, pivotal ontological image worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• The body is necessary to the for-itself yet manifests its contingency #qualifies (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 839
• The body cannot be simultaneously an object and the subject that reveals the world #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 826