part0013

Human consciousness is essentially free; a free flight or transcendence towards the future. Bad faith is a direct possibility of human freedom because bad faith always involves a person choosing herself as a being that need not or cannot make choices, as a being that need not or cannot take responsibility for her responses to situations. Bad faith is the exercise of freedom against itself, it is freedom seeking to deny itself. If, as we have seen, people are inalienably free, then a person in bad faith must be fooling herself somehow. She must be placing faith in an illusion of herself that is contrary to her true nature, an illusion that she herself creates and sustains moment by moment.

It is tempting to say that she deceives herself and that bad faith is self-deception, and this is certainly what bad faith appears to be at first glance. Existentialists, however, resist labelling bad faith as self-deception because self-deception as such is impossible.

It is not possible for a person to lie to herself in the way that she can lie to another person. The other person, being other, has no direct access to her consciousness. There is a duality of consciousnesses. One consciousness can know what the other consciousness does not know and can therefore deceive the other consciousness. There is, however, no such duality within the unity of a single consciousness, otherwise it would not be a single consciousness. A person cannot attempt to deceive herself as she deceives another person without instantly catching herself in the act.

A person can hope to get away with sneaking a piece of the board when she is playing another person at checkers, for example, but she cannot hope to get away with cheating if she is playing herself at checkers. She will always catch herself in the act of deception. Indeed, she will catch herself so readily in her very intention to deceive, that such an intention cannot be seriously formed. It is because a person cannot conceal any intention from herself when playing herself at checkers, either within the rules or not within the rules, that a person only ever plays herself at checkers as an exploration of the impossibility of really playing herself at checkers.

Far from being self-deception, bad faith is rather a form of self-distraction or self-evasion . The term ‘deception’ suggests a liar, but consider the way a conjuror deceives us. The hand is quicker than the eye because the conjurer employs techniques to distract us. The person in bad faith deliberately strives to avoid certain truths by distracting herself from them, by ignoring them.

Although the term ‘ignorance’ is often used to describe the disposition of not knowing , ignorance is in fact a form of knowing. Jane can only ignore Peter if she knows he is there. To ignore someone is to know they are there, yet at the same time to behave, or try to behave, as though they are not there. A person who ignores another is not deceiving herself that the other person is not there, rather she is pretending she is in a world in which the other person is not there. A person, a lover for example, may want the presence of another so she can attract his interest by ignoring him. At other times, however, to strive to ignore someone is to strive in vain to be in an alternative reality where that person does not exist.

In a similar way, a person in bad faith strives to ignore her indeterminacy, ambiguity, freedom and responsibility. She strives in vain to enter an idealised alternative reality where she is a fixed entity that is no longer obliged to make choices, to act, to take responsibility for her present situation. An idealised alternative reality where the lifelong burden of freedom and responsibility can be relinquished is what the person in bad faith aims at and preoccupies herself with.

She aims at this idealised alternative reality in a future that presents itself as realisable and about to be realised but that can never in fact be reached precisely because it can only exist in the future. Rather than confront her present situation, rather than choose herself responsibly as the transcendence of her present circumstances, she chooses herself irresponsibly as (about to be) the transcendence of herself. She aims at being entirely detached from what she is – a person who must choose what she is and must take responsibility for what she chooses – by striving to be a pure transcendence rather than the transcendence of her facticity.

To make better sense of the above abstractions we need to look at specific, concrete examples of people in bad faith. After all, bad faith is not an abstract concept but a concrete, existential phenomenon; the attitude, disposition and way of behaving of particular persons in particular situations. To examine concrete examples of people in bad faith is certainly Sartre’s approach to explaining the phenomenon. As the existentialist theory of bad faith is largely Sartre’s theory, exploring his most notable examples of people in bad faith is undoubtedly the best way forward.

Famous among Sartre’s examples of people in bad faith is the flirtatious but naïve young woman (Being And Nothingness , pp. 78–79). The flirt is approached by a guy who clearly fancies her. She takes the guy’s compliments and polite attentions at face value ignoring their sexual undercurrent. Finally, he takes her hand, establishing a situation that demands from her a decisive response. But she chooses to flirt, neither withdrawing her hand nor acknowledging the implications of holding hands. She treats her hand as though it is not a part of herself, as though it is an object for which she is not responsible, and she treats her act of omission of leaving her hand in the hand of the guy as though it is not an action.

The flirt knows her hand is held and what this implies yet somehow she evades this knowledge, or rather she is the ongoing project of seeking to evade it and distract herself from it. She distracts herself from the meaning of her situation and the disposition of her limbs by fleeing herself towards the future. Each moment she aims to become a being beyond her situated self, the meaning of which would not be her current situation. She aims to become a being that is what it is, an object. Such a being would not be subject to the demands of the situation. It would not be obliged to choose and to act.

She abandons her hand, her whole body, to the past, hoping to leave it all behind her. Yet, in the very act of abandoning it, she re-apprehends the situation of her body as a demand to choose. To take the man’s hand willingly or to withdraw, that is the choice. But she fails to meet this demand by choosing herself as a person that would-be beyond the requirement to choose. It is this negative choice that exercises and distracts her and stands in for the positive choice she knows her situation demands. She avoids making this positive choice by striving to choose herself as a person who has transcended her responsibility for her embodied, situated self. She strives to choose herself as a being that has escaped its facticity.

Every human being is both an object and a subject, a facticity and a transcendence, or to be more precise, the transcendence of her facticity. There are various related forms of bad faith as revealed by the various concrete examples Sartre provides and all of them manipulate in some way the subject-object ‘double property of the human being’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 79). Essentially, bad faith is the project of seeking to invert and/or separate facticity and transcendence.

The flirt treats the facticity of her situation, in terms of which her choices of herself should be exercised, as though it has a transcendent power over her body. That is, she treats her facticity as though it is a transcendence. At the same time, she treats her transcendent consciousness as though it is its own transcendence; as though it is a transcendence-in-itself rather than the transcendence of the facticity of her situation. That is, she treats her transcendence as though it is a facticity.

Another of Sartre’s examples of a character in bad faith is the waiter (Being and Nothingness , pp. 82–83). Sartre paints a vivid picture of the waiter in action. The waiter walks with a robotic stiffness, restraining his movements as though he were a machine. He steps a little too rapidly towards his customers, he is a little too eager and attentive. He is playing at being a waiter.

One view of Sartre’s waiter is that he is in bad faith for striving, through his performance, to deny his transcendence and become his facticity. He overacts his role as a waiter in order to convince himself and others that he is a waiter-thing . As a waiter-thing he would escape his freedom and the anxiety it causes him. He aims to become for himself the mere function that he often is for others in his role as waiter. He strives to be at one with his own representation of himself, but the very fact that he has to represent to himself what he is means that he cannot be it.

Striving to be a thing so as to escape the responsibility of being free is certainly an identifiable form of bad faith. However, against this view of Sartre’s waiter, it can be argued that although the waiter does indeed strive to be a waiter-thing , he is not in bad faith because the purpose of his striving is not to escape his freedom. Arguably, he is no more in bad faith for striving to be a waiter than an actor is in bad faith for striving to be Macbeth.

A closer reading of Sartre’s description of the waiter reveals that, just like an actor, there is a definite sense in which he knows what he is doing. He acts with ironical intent, consciously – though not self-consciously – impersonating a waiter. It is a good impersonation that has become second nature to him. To claim that acting like a waiter is second nature to him is not to claim that he believes he has become a waiter. Rather, it is to claim that he has become his performance in the sense that when he is absorbed in it he does not reflect that he is performing. Sartre says that the waiter ‘plays with his condition in order to realize it’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 82). He does not mean that the waiter plays with his condition in order to become it, but that his condition is only ever realised as a playing with his condition. As it is impossible for any conscious being to achieve identity with itself, the waiter can never be what he is. He can only play at being it.

It can be argued that, far from being in bad faith, the waiter is authentic , the very antithesis of bad faith. Unlike the flirt he does not evade what he is, the transcendence of his facticity, by striving to treat his facticity as a transcendence and his transcendence as a facticity. Instead, he strives to take full responsibility for the reality of his situation, choosing himself positively in his situation by throwing himself wholeheartedly into his chosen role. He strives to embrace what existentialists call his being-in-situation . A waiter in bad faith would be a reluctant, rueful waiter; a waiter who thought, ‘I am not really a waiter’; a waiter who chose to wait at tables while wishing he were someone else somewhere else. Authenticity is considered in detail in Chapter 10.

Sartre’s example of the homosexual (Being and Nothingness , pp. 86–88) reveals further important dimensions of the phenomenon of bad faith. The homosexual does not deny his homosexual desires and activities. Instead, he denies that homosexuality is the meaning of his conduct. Rather than take responsibility for his conduct he chooses to characterise it as a series of aberrations, as the result of curiosity rather than the result of a deep-seated tendency and so on. He believes that a homosexual is not a homosexual as a chair is a chair.

This belief is justified in so far as a person is never what he is but only what he aims to be through his choices. The homosexual is right that he is not a homosexual-thing , but in so far as he has adopted conduct defined as the conduct of a homosexual, he is a homosexual. That he is not a homosexual in the sense that a chair is a chair does not imply that he is not a homosexual in the sense that a chair is not a table. The homosexual plays around with the word ‘being’. He slyly interprets ‘not being what he is ’, as ‘not being what he is not’.

The homosexual attempts to deny he is his facticity, when, in fact, he is his facticity in the mode of no longer being it. That is, although he is not his facticity – his past – in the mode of being it, he is his facticity in so far as it is a past that he affirms as his by having to continually transcend it towards the future. He assumes in bad faith that he is a pure transcendence, that his facticity, being past, has vanished into the absolute nothingness of a generalised past that has nothing whatsoever to do with him. In truth, far from being a pure transcendence, he is and must be the transcendence of his facticity. In his project of bad faith the homosexual attempts to create within himself a rift between facticity and transcendence.

The homosexual has a friend, a champion of sincerity, who urges him to come out and admit that he is a homosexual. In doing so, he urges him to consider himself a facticity rather than a pure transcendence. In urging the homosexual to consider himself a facticity the champion of sincerity aims to stereotype him as ‘just a homosexual’. It is easier for him to achieve this aim if he can persuade the homosexual to apply the label ‘homosexual’ to himself. His motive in seeking to stereotype the homosexual is to deny him the freedom that makes him an individual; it is to transcend him, to label him, to get the better of him.

Ordinarily, sincerity is seen as a form of honesty or good faith. Sartre, however, exposes sincerity as a form of bad faith. If the homosexual took his friend’s advice to be sincere and admitted he was a homosexual, if he declared, ‘I am what I am’, he would not overcome his bad faith. He would simply exchange the bad faith of considering himself a pure transcendence for the bad faith of considering himself a facticity.

We have already seen that the person who considers herself a facticity is in bad faith for seeking to evade the truth that she is the transcendence of her facticity. To declare ‘I am what I am’ is to assert the fallacy that I am a fixed entity, while at the same time evading the existential truth that I am an indeterminate being who must continually create myself through choice and action. In short, it is to declare myself a facticity when in reality I am the transcendence of my facticity.

The sincerity identified above is relatively unsophisticated. Sartre also identifies a more sophisticated and devious form of sincerity. This more sophisticated form of sincerity still involves a person declaring ‘I am what I am’, but here her aim is not to be what she is, rather it is to distance herself from what she is through the very act by which she declares what she is.

In declaring herself to be a thing she aims to become that which declares she is a thing rather than the thing she declares herself to be. She posits herself as a thing in order to escape being that thing; in order to become that which contemplates the thing she has ceased to be. Unlike a person who adopts the simpler form of sincerity, she does not aim to be her facticity by denying her transcendence, she aims to be a pure transcendence divorced from her facticity. Sartre identifies confession as an instance of this more sophisticated form of sincerity.

The person who confesses a sin, for example, renders her sin into an object for her contemplation that exists only in so far as she contemplates it and ceases to exist when she ceases to contemplate it. Believing herself to be a pure transcendence she believes she is free to move on from her sin and to abandon it to the past as a disarmed sin that is neither her possession nor her responsibility. Confession that aims at absolution is bad faith.

In Truth and Existence Sartre takes the example of a woman with tuberculosis (Truth and Existence , pp. 33–35). The woman refuses to acknowledge that she has tuberculosis despite having all the symptoms. She views each symptom in isolation, refusing to recognise their collective meaning. She engrosses herself in pursuits that do not afford her time to visit the doctor, pursuits that distract her from making the choices required by her situation. Her symptoms place her at the threshold of new knowledge, but she chooses ignorance because she does not want the responsibility of dealing with her tuberculosis, of seeking a cure for it and so on, that new knowledge would call for. In her refusal to face her situation, in her self-distraction and her evasion of responsibility, she is similar to Sartre’s flirt considered earlier.

Bad faith is wilful ignorance. Bad faith is irresponsibility. To dispense with such wilful ignorance and irresponsibility and instead to courageously affirm the hard existential truths of the human condition – ambiguity, freedom, responsibility, mortality and so on – is to overcome bad faith in favour of authenticity. It is nearly time to examine the existential holy grail of authenticity, but first we need to examine responsibility , the raw material from which that holy grail is made.