I’ve found Sartre to truly understand the concept of bad faith and the example that we have thus far discussed, you must first understand his method of Philosophy. Sartre was simply an existence philosopher, seeing philosophy as an illumination of existence itself, through action. ‘Being and Nothingness’ is to been seen as Sartre’s continuation of Husserl’s Phenomenology, and Heidegger’s Existentialism (although Heidegger denied this label on his work). In ‘Being and Time’, where Sartre inherits a proportion of his puzzling terminology, Heidegger firmly asserts beyond Phenomenology that we are all beings in the world which are separate from our knowledge, “we are not just reasoning minds with a body attached”. Sartre would firmly agree, respecting but also denying the solipsism of Hume or rationalism of Descartes.
In a series of lectures called ‘No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life’ Robert C Soloman explains Sartre’s Philosophy in ‘Being and Nothingness’, and other of his existentialist works, such as ‘Nausea’ and ‘No Exit’, as one of “No excuses”. By this, he observes what I believe is a key point in the conversation of bad faith, which I will refer to when in due course. This is the relationship between our freedom and our responsibility, in that it is not that we can choose what we want, but rather that we always have choices, no matter how restricted we are, and therefore have a responsibility to these choices. Sartre’s existentialism advocates that we are made by these choices that we make. The implication of this is that we can have no excuses in any given situation; we have ultimate responsibility. To provide an example, Sartre was famous for saying that we are all responsible for the war (World War Two). This for Sartre was displayed by the French reaction to occupation and the excuses, often driven by emotion, from many not to join resistance, be they of helplessness, fear, self interest, innocence or following the herd, all are veneers covering the choices we have to make, or have made. If an emotion can become our choice, then I believe we have our foundations for the possibility of Bad Faith to occur.
To grasp the concept of Bad Faith we must further explore how Sartre conceives consciousness. He sees a switch around of our causal relations with the world. Consciousness is Nothingness, it is not an object that hides behind our awareness, it is not caused by the world, but rather it is outside of these causal relations, independent and distinct. In not being caused it is free, and so it is our freedom. To return to Heidegger again and his example of hammering nails in wood, I believe Sartre similarly implies that what we see is defined by or expectations. When we perform a task like hammering, we pick up the hammer with pre-reflections that it will perform the specific task, we do not constantly reason this is a hammer (how is it made? how do I use it? etc...) No, we simply perceive and expect of it. This is because, for Sartre, the self is an accumulation determined by our activity in the world, separate from our consciousness, which is not aware of itself. A distinction which not only accounts for our ability to perform these certain tasks under pre-reflection, but also further opens the door to Bad Faith.
Sartre believes “one does not undergo his bad faith; one is not affected with it; it is not a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith” and in line with my comments on consciousness earlier he further states that this process “implies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehension (of) consciousness as affecting itself with bad faith”. If one is fully conscious of deceiving oneself then surely the lie could not hold, and her also expresses, “To escape these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious”. This Sartre believes the main crux of his argument against the psychoanalytical interpretation outlined by Kartik. By attempting to deny our choices, even those made through default or neglect, is to excuse them, and there is for Sartre no unconscious accountable for in bad faith, he then turns to what he calls refers to as ”the double property of the human being”. So, for my exploration into bad faith I will not further define facticity or transcendence, I will use Jaide’s understanding of them, as the facts true about ourselves, and our overreaching of these facts (plans, hopes, fears etc...) respectively.
Bad Faith can be seen to me as the misperceptions of the self for the purpose of avoiding responsibility of the self. I would further go forward to agree that it is, as mentioned, an act of lying to oneself, an imbalance of our facticity and transcendence. It is a self-deception of the self. It is confusing our transcendence and implied choices with our facticity, but also the reverse can also be seen as acting in Bad Faith, as with the woman on the date in the example already discussed, who is denying transcendence. As Sartre so elegantly puts it “I am what I am not, I am not what I am” – which in translates more simply as ‘what I want determines who I am’.
Sartre argues that many of us often “live in bad faith”, however to live without bad faith entirely would be to omit our fallibility, which unfortunately is intertwined within our very nature. To strike the ultimate balance, is to be god, infallible, all of our facticity and transcendence at once; to be nothingness.
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