that the body is the “facticity” of consciousness.^18 It is not distinct
from the situation of the for-itself. Indeed, the body is the “given”
of our embodied existence, the orientation that is our perceptive field.
As his analysis of shame consciousness so graphically illustrated, “the
structure of the world demands that we can not see withoutbeing visible”
(BN 317 ).
But is consciousness “reducible” to body the way “eliminative materi-
alists” wish to reduce mind to brain functions? Sartre’s position is
ambiguous, as the following remarks indicate:
Consciousness exists its body. Thus the relation between body-as-point of view and
things is anobjectiverelation, and the relation of consciousness to the body is an
existentialrelation...[This means] that consciousness can exist its body only as
consciousness. Thereforemybody is a conscious structure of my consciousness. But
precisely because the body is the point of view on which there can not be a point
of view, there is on the level of unreflective consciousness no consciousness of the
body. The body belongs then to the structures of the non-thetic self-consciousness.
So it seems as if he were defending some form of reductionism. But he
continues:
Yet can we identify it purely and simply with this non-thetic consciousness? That
is not possible either, for non-thetic consciousness is self-consciousness as the free
project toward a possibility which is its own; that is, in so far as it is the foundation
of its own nothingness...In short, consciousness (of) the body is lateral and
retrospective: the body is the neglected, the “passed over in silence.” And yet the
body is what this consciousnessis; it is not even anything except body. The rest is
nothingness and silence.
(BN 329 – 330 )
This is an application of Sartre’s general thesis that “Thesituation,a
common product of the contingency of the in-itself and of freedom, is an
ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself to
distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent”
(BN 488 ). Faced with the rock “too steep to climb,” in his famous
example, it will appear too steep only if I abandon the effort to acquire
the training to scale it. What is an obstacle for me may not be so for
(^18) This was Hazel Barnes’s contention (see Schilpp, “Sartre as Materialist,” 665 ). It follows,
she argues, from its role as the contingency of consciousness.
210 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness