Body-for-Others
ELI5
Your body as you feel it from the inside — your aches, your sensations, your sense of where your limbs are — is completely different from your body as a doctor sees it on an examination table. The "body-for-others" is that second kind of body: the one that belongs, in a sense, to everyone else's eyes rather than to your own experience.
Definition
The body-for-others names the specific mode in which the body appears as an object within the field of inter-subjective being — that is, the body as it is constituted and encountered not from the first-person lived perspective but through the gaze and experience of another consciousness. Sartre introduces this concept as a necessary consequence of his ontology of being-for-others: because my being is radically split between an immanent, lived dimension (the body-for-me) and an externalized, objectified dimension (the body-for-others), the body cannot be treated as a single unified phenomenon. The body-for-others is my flesh as it appears in the world among other things — measurable, examinable, spatially located — and is therefore irreducibly alien to my first-person experience of embodiment.
This duality is not accidental but reflects the deeper structural fact that being-for-others is grounded in mutual and irreducible negations between consciousnesses that can never be synthesized into a totalizing framework. The physician's clinical knowledge of my body is paradigmatic: it operates exclusively on the body-for-others, on a body in the midst of the world, governed by external observation and instrumental categories that bypass the lived interiority of embodiment entirely. The body-for-others thus marks the point at which facticity — the brute, unchosen thereness of my being — becomes fully visible as an object, stripped of the nihilating movement of my own consciousness and frozen into the opacity that characterizes the in-itself. It is the somatic dimension of the "Me-as-object" that the Look of the Other installs and that I can never fully reclaim.
Place in the corpus
The body-for-others is introduced in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness as a specification and somatic elaboration of the broader ontological category of being-for-others. If being-for-others names the general structure by which my existence is constituted as an object through another consciousness's Look, body-for-others applies that structure specifically to embodiment, showing that even the most intimate dimension of my existence — my flesh — is cleaved by the inter-subjective relation into two irreducible and non-synthesizable aspects. It thus functions as an extension and concretization of being-for-others into the domain of facticity: the body is the privileged site where facticity becomes visible to the Other, and the body-for-others is the name for facticity as objectified.
In relation to the cross-referenced canonicals, the concept sits at the intersection of alienation, facticity, and subjectivity. Like Lacanian alienation, the body-for-others designates a dimension of the subject's being that is constituted through an exterior field (the Other's gaze) and cannot be fully appropriated by the subject itself. Like facticity, it designates the brute, unchosen givenness of embodied existence — but now as that givenness appears to an Other rather than as it is lived from within. The concept also resonates with the Lacanian critique of consciousness: the body-for-others is precisely the body as consciousness cannot access it from its own interior vantage point, the body that eludes the for-itself's translucency and becomes opaque, worldly, and thing-like. Together, these cross-references position body-for-others as a phenomenological ground for understanding how the subject is structurally divided — not only at the level of meaning and signification, but already at the level of bodily existence.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown)
the body which I have just described is not my body such as it is for me... So far as the physicians have had any experience with my body, it was with my body in the midst of the world and as it is for others.
The phrase "in the midst of the world" is theoretically decisive: it locates the body-for-others squarely within the ontological register of the in-itself — worldly, spatially situated, available to external observation — in direct contrast to the lived body-for-me, which is characterized by its nihilating withdrawal from that same world. The implicit opposition between "for me" and "for others" encapsulates the irreducible duality at the heart of the concept, and the invocation of "physicians" grounds the abstract ontological split in a concrete institutional practice that operates entirely on the objectified, exteriorized body.