Resisting Sartrean pain
Henry, Sartre and biranism
pp. 120-129
in: Katherine J. Morris (ed), Sartre on the body, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
It is with the above quote that Sartre (in Part III, section I of Being and Nothingness) characterizes, albeit briefly, how we as embodied individuals engage with the world, how we sense or experience the world. Sartre, in opposition to Maine de Biran, perhaps the most important Gallic theorist of the body prior to Sartre,1 denies that kinaesthetic sensation plays a role in our experience of our bodies. Rather, we just perceive or experience the "resistance of things', the world appears to us as being "difficult to deal with', but we do not experience the effort involved in our attempts to deal with that world.
