Bad Faith

According to Simone de Beauvoir bad faith is an act of lying to oneself; other philosophers have similar interpretations of Sartre’s work as being so. However, it is important to distinguish between 'lying in general' or falsehood and bad faith. A ‘liar intends to deceive and he does not seek to hide this intention from himself not to disguise the translucency of consciousness’ (BN, pp.48). In this way Sartre even regards a lie, as its foundation is founded on truth, as an act of transcendence or in other words an act of expressing extreme freedom. Although bad faith and falsehood are said to have overlaps, it is a distinctive type of deception – which is by its very nature common to all. I shall now attempt to define and explain the Sartrian notion of bad faith in terms of the example given of the women who is companied by a man on an outing. It is important to note here that she chose to go on this ‘date’.

Before continuing to the concept of bad faith it might be beneficial to define the terms transcendence and facticity. Transcendence is the ‘ability to intend and reach beyond any factual situation in which we find ourselves. We have desires. We hope…’ and facticity refers to the facts which we have no or little control over i.e. ‘where we were born…the facts that are true of us’ (Soloman, 2006, pp.133-4). The intimate relation between these two concepts is inescapable, for we only know of a concept such as of freedom because we are in the first place constrained by facticity. However being that we are conscious beings in that we have extreme freedom we should be able to act in accordance with this freedom without trying to be ‘true to ourselves’ – as this is referring to who we think we are, which is who we were not who we are as we are always in constant flux (I will refer to ego later). We are not static beings as Joy clarified we are always in flux therefore we can never pin point to exactly who we are in reference to the past. Take for example the waiter – he is a waiter but at the same time he can not always be the waiter because he has been a number of different ‘things’ up until now.

Like Michelle Darnell, I think that Sartre is talking about two different freedoms. The first is our motion – reacts to physical things i.e. reflexes. The other type of freedom is what she calls ‘original freedom’. As a being we are essentially a being-for-itself since we are conscious and consciousness is free.

‘[w]hile an identity relation holds between being-for-itself and original freedom, and this freedom is necessarily present so long as being-for-itself may not always express that freedom, and thus appear to be un-free in the world’. This in the case this refers to the woman’s inactiveness – she postpones the decision of whether she wants him or not. According to the Sartre, she is being irresponsible with her ‘freedom’. But isn’t she freely choosing to ignore his gestures? Darnell states that one can choose to be ‘unfree’ if I ‘allow others to treat me as nothing more than a thing in the world, or correlatively, view all my actions as determined or mere motions’ (Darnell, pp.16). Therefore it can be that ‘I am lying to myself about my free existence’ (ibid, pp.16)) – this is arguable. As the women does not respond as a being-for-itself but rather a ‘being-in-itself’ – an object as ‘For my freedom to be expressed in the world, I must be a person engaged in action’ (ibid, pp.17) and those actions which are intentional. The woman however denies her transcendence in that she wants to be sincere to whom she is as she is aware of all that she has been therefore her presence rests on facticity. She is fully aware of her freedom but resorts to ‘nothingness’. This nothingness’ is the ‘being-in-itself’ passivity. The woman is in bad faith because she is in anguish due to the unity of the same consciousness which wishes not to acknowledge something, at the same time as knowing what it is she wishes not to acknowledge and this is exactly what is presented in the example of Bad Faith. In this sense her ‘nothingness’ is prolonged until a decision is reached but in this case we are told she does not reach a decision; ‘neither consenting nor resisting-a thing’ (BN, pp.56). Is she denying her freedom by reflecting on who she is instead who is coming to be?

But how can you trick yourself? How can you at the same time as knowing or desiring so the exact opposite? For Sartre ‘we can neither reject nor comprehend bad faith’.

David Sherman’s interpretation of what Sartre is saying is that bad faith ‘must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends one (presumably through self-consciousness), he can find himself abruptly faced with the other' (Sherman, pp.139).

What do you think?

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