Avere un corpo o essere un corpo? Il problema della corporeità in Jean-Paul Sartre = To have a body or to be a body? The problem of corporeity in Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

Eighty years after the publication of the famous work L'être et le néant, from which this essay takes its starting point, we aim to re-examine the subject-object relationship. The philosopher, starting from the questions and also from the theoretical difficulties faced by Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, focuses on the problem of corporeity. The body is presented almost as if it were a bridge placed between the interiority of the activities of consciousness, referring to the body that I feel and I live and the external world, grasped starting from my body made an object by others, looked at, stripped and manipulated like the inert bodies of things and, also, capable of action and orientation similarly to the body of Others. Split into its four ontological dimensions (three in Sartre's work), irreconcilable with each other, the body thus understood ends up, although the intent was opposite, by making the terms of the dialectical relationship even more distant, precipitating the relationship of being between the two in an undefined spatiality, inhabited by nothingness and the absurd. However, if it is true that we are made of flesh in a world of flesh, that we are bodies in a world of bodies, it is appropriate to clarify how we are beings of/in this world. Is it therefore possible to reconcile the subjective dimension and the objective dimension, thus resolving Cartesian dualism? Can Sartre do it?