Abstract

It is commonly recognized that sartre's philosophy rests upon a doctrine of radical freedom or, More technically, The absolute spontaneity of conscious acts. Simply put, Sartre believes that consciousness alone determines its own intentional mode of being. But one such intentional mode of being is perception, In which sensible appearances seem to be radically dependent upon changes in the body's sense organs. The purpose of this paper is to examine sartre's theory of the body and critically analyze his attempt to reconcile the spontaneity of perception with the relativity of sensible appearances to modifications of the body. The first section of the paper summarizes sartre's criticism of the theory of sensations appearances as a causal relation in which certain "objective" changes in the sense organs produce certain "subjective" changes in perceptions or sensations. Sartre proposed two sets of distinctions involving the relationship between the body and consciousness. His first distinction, Examined closely in the second section, Is between the body as an object in the world (the body-For-Others) and the body as it is experienced by the consciousness whose body it is (the body-For-Itself). (edited)