Sartre’s account of the senses

Sartre’s account of the senses treats seeing, touching, and hearing not as private stores of sensation but as ways a body is situated in a world of objects. A sense cannot be grasped as an inner activity apart from what it reveals: it is the objective, perspectival organization of the world, inseparable from the perceiver’s facticity and freedom. The theory thus redirects the question from what sensation is inside the subject to how a world appears through embodied involvement.

Beyond Inner Sensation

Sartre begins by distinguishing the objects encountered from the supposed subjective impressions that classical theories place behind them. A person sees the green of a notebook or foliage, not a separate sensation of green; likewise, the polished marble is encountered as cold, not first as an isolated mental content. The senses remain real even though this private phantom of sensation is never encountered. Losing sight or becoming deaf changes how a world is accessible, but does not reveal a hidden sensation that had previously been the sense itself.

The inkwell makes the difficulty precise. It is immediately present as a thing, yet its presence is visible: awareness of the inkwell is at the same time awareness of seeing it. Sight, however, does not become another object of knowledge. Reflection can disclose consciousness of the inkwell, but not a sensory activity considered independently. Sartre invokes the maxim that the eye cannot see itself: a hypothetical third eye might observe two eyes as objects, but it would not disclose their seeing as lived from within. Touching a hand that is itself touching, or seeing one’s own eyes, likewise shifts to the standpoint of the Other and makes the sense organs objects rather than revealing the sensing activity.

This inapprehensibility does not mean that the senses are absent. Sight, touch, and hearing are everywhere at work, although they are not available as self-contained objects for the subject. Nor can they be defined as a succession of inner states. Sartre therefore proposes defining a sense through the system of objects it makes perceptible, and through the orientation that orders those objects in a field.

Orientation, Field, and Choice

Objects appear against a ground and in relations of exteriority to other things. A figure is intelligible only against a perceptual field: a focused sound, for example, stands out against the resonant field of undifferentiated noises called silence. A visual, tactile, or auditory field is necessary for particular things to appear at all. The general relation between figure and ground is thus constitutive, not an optional addition to an already complete object.

The particular arrangement within that field is both given and chosen. The world presents an original distribution of things, a facticity the perceiver does not freely create; at the same time, attention selects one thing rather than another. A book must appear to one side or the other of a table, but its appearing specifically on the left is contingent, and attention can turn toward the book or toward the table that supports it. Sense names this conjunction of necessity, contingency, and freedom. An object appears as a whole—the cup, the inkwell, the cube—yet always from a particular perspective, in relation to the ground and to other things.

Senses as Objective Perspective

Sartre describes the senses as contemporaneous with sensible objects, not as a prior apparatus that produces them or a later layer of private images copied from them. They are the objective rule of the objects’ perspectival revelation. Sight, accordingly, is not a sum of visual sensations or a passive effect of light rays. It is the organized collection of visible objects as their reciprocal relations refer to selected measures and a center of perspective. On this account, the senses are not simply subjective modifications hidden inside consciousness.

Changes in perception can be described through relations among objects. Closing the eyelids blocks the room’s objects while presenting the eyelids as an object; gloves placed on a tablecloth conceal a design in the same way. Seeing yellow through jaundice or yellow glasses is likewise explained through an objective relation in the world, rather than by positing a private alteration that must stand behind the appearance. Even when the center of visual reference is destroyed, visible objects do not thereby vanish. They remain as a totality in the absolute reciprocity of their relations, no longer organized around a particular center.

Blindness, Daltonism, and myopia therefore define, in the first instance, ways in which a world is there for someone: they belong to the facticity of that person’s being-in-the-world. The senses can be known and objectively described, but only indirectly, by extending in thought the indications that things provide. Such reconstruction resembles a historian’s reconstruction of a person from evidence. It gives a rational account of the sense, not the lived perspective through which the world is encountered.

Body and Being-in-the-World

The account ultimately makes the perceiver’s relation to the world fundamental. The upsurge of the for-itself both brings the world into view as a totality of things and establishes the senses as the objective modes in which their qualities are presented. The senses are not a bridge between an isolated subject and an external world; they are the perceiver’s being-in-the-world in its concrete, worldly situation.

Abstract thought can reconstruct different sensory centers as equivalent points of reference, but this surveying stance has a cost. By treating every center as interchangeable, thought effaces the world’s character as a world arranged around a situated perspective. The perceiver escapes, in abstraction, the senses that are lived as being-in-the-world; the personal relation to the world is severed, and the world dissolves into the absolute equivalence of indefinitely many possible relations.

The body extends this account beyond the familiar idea of a seat for five senses. It is also the total center of reference indicated by things, and the instrument and end of action. Sartre consequently refuses to separate sensation from action: reality presents itself neither simply as a thing nor simply as an instrument, but as an instrumental thing. His account makes bodily perception practical as well as perspectival, and prepares the analysis of the body as a center of action.