The body is the contingent form assumed by the necessity of one’s contingency.
Evidence
But the world refers to me the image of this unjustifiability in the form of the synthetic unity of its univocal relations to me. It is absolutely necessary that the world appear to me in order. And in this sense this order is me; it is that image of me which we described in the last chapter of Part Two. But it is wholly contingent that it should be this order. Thus it appears as the necessary and totally unjustifiable arrangement of the totality of being. This absolutely necessary and totally unjustifiable order of the things of the world, this order which is myself in so far as I am neither the foundation of my being nor the foundation of a particular being—this order is the body as it is on the level of the for-itself. In this sense we could define the body as the contingent form which is assumed by the necessity of my contingency. The body is nothing other than the for-itself; it is not an in-itself in the for-itself, for in that case it would solidify everything. But it is the fact that the for-itself is not its own foundation, and this fact is expressed by the necessity of existing as an engaged, contingent being among other contingent beings. As such the body is not distinct from the situation of the for-itself since for the for-itself, to exist and to be situated are one and the same; on the other hand the body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the world is the total situation of the for-itself and the measure of its existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 838
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sartre’s definition of the body as inseparable from the for-itself — the body is not an object in the world but the world’s order as my situation. Central to his account of embodiment.
- XREF: Body as situation (not in-itself) sets up Beauvoir’s The Second Sex account of the body as lived situation rather than fixed biology. — connects to: The human body remains contingent and superfluous even in decomposition.; The body is a permanent structure of being, not a contingent addition. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 870; The psychic body gives psychic phenomena a substrate of contingency grounded in materiality. (+6 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The compression here — body = world-order = my unjustifiable necessity — is a dense, paradigm-shifting identity claim that resists one-sentence summary and rewards return.
Broader Connections
- The body is necessary to the for-itself yet manifests its contingency
#expands(0.88) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 839 - The essence of necessity is contingency, grounded in an event
#qualifies(0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 128 - Habit transforms contingent acts into essential determinations of being.
#complicates(0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 601