Flesh
ELI5
When you look at another person's body, you don't just see a thing—you see something that feels "alive" yet stuck, a presence that just happens to be there with no good reason for being exactly as it is. That sense of raw, accidental "hereness" in another's body is what Sartre calls flesh.
Definition
In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, as presented in Being and Nothingness, "flesh" names the specific mode in which the Other's body appears to me as an object: not as a mere thing among other worldly things, nor as the lived, non-thetic self-presence that the Other enjoys from within his own for-itself, but as the pure, irremediable contingency of his presence. The Other lives his body as a "taste of himself"—a pre-reflective, non-positional immanence that is never itself an object for him. But when I encounter that same body from without, through the structure of being-for-others, what was lived opacity becomes visible facticity: I see contingency incarnate, a transcendence-transcended, a freedom that has been fixed and sedimented into a body-in-situation. Flesh is therefore the name for the Other's facticity as it appears to me—an objectivity inseparable from the situation it organises, yet irreducibly contingent, carrying no inner necessity.
This concept also grounds Sartre's equation of body and psychism. Because what the Other feels, emotes, or undergoes is not a hidden interiority expressed through a body but simply is the meaningful body-in-situation, the Other's emotions are readable not as signs pointing to something behind them but as flesh itself in its affective modulation. Flesh is thus the site where the gap between the for-itself's lived self-givenness and the in-itself's thinghood collapses into an irreducible third term: a contingent, fully present, yet always-already transcended materiality.
Place in the corpus
The concept of flesh appears in the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological as a specification of several canonical concepts working together. It extends facticity into the intersubjective register: where facticity denotes the brute contingency of one's own existence that one cannot ground or escape, flesh is facticity as it appears from the outside—the Other's unchosen, irremediable thereness encountered by me as sheer contingent presence. It equally depends on being-for-others: the Look that constitutes me as object for the Other is precisely the mechanism by which his body, lived by him as pre-reflective self-taste, becomes, for me, objectified as flesh. Without the asymmetry built into being-for-others—each consciousness constituting the other as in-itself-like object—there could be no such transformation of lived opacity into seen contingency.
Flesh also sits in a precise relation to for-itself and in-itself. The Other as for-itself inhabits his body non-thetically, never fully possessing it as an object. But from my position the Other's body is caught between these two poles: it is not inert in-itself (it is still organised by a situation, still expressive of a transcendence), yet it is not freely ongoing for-itself (I catch it as fixed, contingent, there). Flesh thus names this ontological hybrid—transcendence-transcended—and represents the point where phenomenology, situation, and appearance converge. As an appearance, flesh does not refer to a hidden psychism behind it; it is the psychism, the emotion, the body fully identified with meaning-in-situation. This makes flesh one of Sartre's most compressed formulations of the identity of body and mind, and it stands as a singular coined notion within the corpus rather than a recurrent technical term.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown)
What for the Other is his taste of himself becomes for me the Other's flesh. The flesh is the pure contingency of presence.
The quote's theoretical force rests on the contrast between "taste of himself"—a non-thetic, immanent self-givenness internal to the Other's for-itself—and "flesh," which marks the moment that same self-givenness becomes visible to me as pure contingency; the phrase "pure contingency of presence" then collapses all interiority into factical thereness, making the Other's body not an expression of something hidden but the thing itself, fully present and irremediably accidental.