The same physical effort presents completely different phenomenological experiences to different people.

Evidence

Sartre was different. He would be persuaded to join her on walks, but didn’t enjoy the sensation of fatigue. Being and Nothingness contains a marvellous description of slogging up a hill behind an unnamed companion, whom one pictures as Beauvoir (although the scene has something in common with Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mont Ventoux). While this companion seems to be having fun, Sartre experiences the effort as a nuisance, something that intrudes on his freedom. He gives in quickly, throws down his knapsack and collapses at the roadside. The other person is tired too, but finds it blissful to forge on, feeling the glow of sunburn on the back of the neck and relishing the way the roughness of the path is revealed afresh by each trudging step. The whole landscape presents itself differently to the two of them. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 389

Categorization

• DEFINE: The hill-climb passage vividly instantiates phenomenology’s core thesis: the same brute fact is experienced differently depending on one’s intentional relation to it.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay contrasting Beauvoir’s embodied, absorbing relation to fatigue with Sartre’s freedom-guarding resistance — the two poles of existentialist embodiment.
• XREF: connects to: Perceived physical differences are themselves shaped by cultural and economic status — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 709; Shared bodily experience anchors the cross-cultural sharing of other minds.

Broader Connections

• Perceived physical differences are themselves shaped by cultural and economic status #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 709
• Shared bodily experience anchors the cross-cultural sharing of other minds. #qualifies (0.72)