Body-for-others

Body-for-others names the body as it exists in the field of another consciousness. It is not an anatomical object concealed beneath behavior, nor a passive sign pointing toward a separate inner mind: it is the other person’s contingent presence as it appears through an organized situation, and the self’s corresponding exposure as an object for another. The concept makes bodily existence inseparable from perspective, action, and the world shared with others.

A second plane of bodily existence

The account begins by distinguishing the body-for-others from the body as lived from within. For the self, the body is either the unthematized center from which the instrumental things of the world take their bearings, or the contingency that consciousness exists. These are complementary ways of being, but neither turns the self’s body into an ordinary instrument that can be surveyed from an outside point of view. The body also has another plane of existence: it appears to others, just as their bodies appear to the self.

The two directions of appearance are structurally reciprocal. To study how another’s body appears to the self is, in the relevant ontological respect, to study how the self’s body appears to another. The distinction is not between one person who is truly embodied and another who is merely seen; each can live a body as the center of a world and encounter a body as an object within that world. Body-for-others names the latter relation without erasing the former.

How the body appears among things

When the other is made an object, the other appears as a transcendence-transcended: a being whose own movement toward possibilities is surpassed by the consciousness that encounters and uses that being. The other is first indicated not by a hidden inner life, but by the arrangement of things. Tools and other instrumental objects have secondary references that suggest a further center in the world, someone for whom they are organized or who benefits from their arrangement.

That center is presented as an organizer or beneficiary of instruments, and so initially as an instrument-user among instruments. The self, too, is indicated by things in the world and becomes a body in being so indicated. But the other’s body is encountered through the lateral, secondary arrangement of objects, while the self’s body cannot be taken up in the same way as one more tool. The body-for-others is therefore the other as a transcendence-instrument: a point of view that can itself be viewed, and an instrument that can be used or can resist use.

This difference marks a boundary between lived embodiment and objective utility. The self cannot take up an ordinary point of view on its own body as the thing designated by the world. To think of that body as a pure instrument among other instruments would collapse the world’s organization around it. The other’s body, by contrast, can be integrated into the self’s world, indicate other objects, and in turn indicate the self. Its objective utility and adversity belong to the way it is encountered, not to an exhaustive account of what the other is for itself.

Contingency, presence, and flesh

The other’s body is grasped as a contingent configuration: it is here, though it could be elsewhere; it is this way, though it could be otherwise. The objects around it could be arranged differently, and even the distance between a chair and the body could change. These variations disclose the same underlying fact: the other is present in the self’s world as a particular being-there, expressed through being this.

The body’s specific face and sense organs are not necessary in themselves. The other must be encountered as having a body, but need not have this particular face or these particular organs. Face, bodily presence, and the features associated with a race, class, or environment are contingent forms through which the other’s existence becomes available to the self. What the other lives as a taste of himself appears to the self as flesh: the pure contingency of another’s presence, not an additional substance concealed behind the body.

Flesh can remain screened by clothes, make-up, hair, beard, or expression. Yet long acquaintance may bring an instant in which these disguises fall away and the other’s presence is apprehended in the face or elsewhere on the body as sheer contingency. This is not merely a piece of knowledge about appearance. It is an affective apprehension, a particular kind of nausea, in which the body’s irreducible presence is felt rather than explained away.

The body as a situation of action

The other’s body cannot be detached from the situation that gathers around it. It is not first a neutral body and then, in a second step, an actor entering a prearranged scene. Rather, the other is given from the beginning as a body in situation; the body is the objective contingency of the other’s action and the center in terms of which a situation is organized. Its significance lies in the way bodily presence and worldly arrangement arise together.

The example of Pierre makes this structure concrete. Pierre’s body is not first a separate hand that might later take hold of a glass. The hand, glass, and living body form a complex in which the hand’s flesh marks the contingency of the whole action. The body is thus not a corpse-like assembly of parts to which an external mind subsequently assigns movement. Its parts are encountered through the meaningful whole of an embodied act.

For the same reason, perception does not ordinarily register a raised arm alongside a motionless body and then infer an intention behind it. It perceives Pierre raising his hand. The temporal organization of the whole body gives the movement of its parts their order and meaning. A hand that seems to crawl by itself along a doorway, or an arm that appears not to belong to any body, is striking precisely because it disrupts this ordinary synthesis and makes bodily disintegration seem extraordinary.

A photograph that enlarges Pierre’s hands as he holds them forward offers another test. The camera records the hands in their own dimensions, without their synthetic connection to bodily totality, and the result is shocking: to the naked eye the same hands appear without enlargement. Within the situation, the body is perceived as a synthetic totality of life and action. Isolated measurement and lived perception therefore do not disclose the body in the same way.

Expression, meaning, and the other’s world

On this account, Pierre’s body is not something separable from Pierre-for-the-self. To be an object for others and to be a body are equivalent ontological modalities of being-for-others. Bodily meanings do not point to a mysterious psyche located beyond the visible body; they refer to the world and to themselves as bodily phenomena. What may be called psychic life is encountered in the body as a transcendence that has become an object.

Frowns, redness, stammering, trembling hands, and lowered looks are not outward effects that merely report an inaccessible anger. In the relevant situation, they are the anger. A clenched fist taken by itself means nothing, but the perception at issue is never simply of a fist: it is of a person who clenches a fist in a situation. Read in relation to the past, to possibilities, and to the body’s organized whole, the gesture is anger because it belongs to possible actions in the world, such as striking or insulting. The supposed psychic object is released to perception through bodily structures rather than discovered behind them.

This does not make the other’s body an inanimate thing. The body is a psychic object, but it is a transcendence-transcended, so perception of it cannot be identical to perception of an inert object. Its meanings are public in the sense that they appear bodily and refer to a world, yet the other’s capacity to know the self is not simply read from a collection of organs. It is disclosed in the original relation in which the self can be an object for the other, and in which the self’s world can be seen as fleeing toward that other.

Body-for-others consequently holds together two facts that are easily pulled apart: another’s body is encountered as contingent, usable, and open to perception, while its meaningful presence is never just a collection of external parts. The body is the other’s action in a world and the point around which a situation coheres. In the same encounter, the self apprehends its own body indirectly as a center of reference for the other. Embodiment is thus neither a private possession sealed within an individual nor an empty object on display; it is a relation in which each person can appear to the other as a body and as a perspective on the world.