ABSTRACT
The problem of the body and its relations to consciousness is often obscured by the fact that we posit the body right from the start as a certain thing, possessed of its own laws and capable of being defined from the outside, while we reach consciousness through the type of inner intuition that is distinctive. And yet, in another sense, the body manifests my contingency, and is even nothing but this contingency: the Cartesian rationalists were right to be struck by this characteristic; in effect, it represents the individuation of my commitment within the world. And Plato was not wrong either to present the body as what individuates the soul. Only it would be fruitless to suppose that the soul is the body, in so far as the for-itself is its own individuation. The problem of sensory knowledge was posed on the occasion of the appearance in the midst of the world of certain objects that know as the senses.
