Jean-Paul Sartre: Critically evaluate Sartres description of the forms of bad faith, and the relationship between bad faith and authenticity, accord

Jean-Paul Sartre: Critically evaluate Sartres description of the forms of bad faith, and the relationship between bad faith and authenticity, according to him.

Introduction

According to Sartre bad faith (mauvais foi) is a form of self-deception. It is a way of denying our radical freedom, as described by Sartre; a way to refuse our capacity to choose what projects we pursue and assign our own significance, meaning or value therein. Our possessing radical freedom entails an overwhelming responsibility that leads the individual to a state of anguish and despair. Bad faith then serves to avoid that distressing situation and accept our possessing fixed natures and thus fixed character traits that could justify and motivate our choice of projects, as well as serve as an excuse for whatever action or inaction that leads to. Sartre rejects the existence of a fixed nature for the Being-for-itself, and the existence of absolute values embedded in the fabric of the universe. In Sartres words, the self-deception of bad faith is portrayed as follows: It is best to choose and to examine one determined attitude which is essential to human reality, and which is such that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. By this, he describes precisely that self-negation, self-denial, which is the case of bad faith. For Sartre bad faith is pervasive and ubiquitous in human societies, although it is not an unalterable condition. In the current essay I will attempt to defend Sartres view and argue that bad faith is an inescapable disposition of human reality where human reality is rather taken to be the empirical structure of human existence a part of what it means to be human, within the cultural context of our societies, while making no claim for the ontological necessity of such an attitude.

Main Part

First of all, let us discuss a few background elements of Sartrean existentialism in order to be able to understand the concept of bad faith. Bad faith springs from a fundamental aspect of Sartres ontology, namely, the kind of being of the Being-for-itself. The Being-for-itself lacks self-identity, as opposed to the being-in-itself which merely is what it is; the For-itself is fundamentally characterised by nothingness; for it existence precedes essence and in that sense its being is unjustifiable. An interpretation of this is that the For-itself is not plainly itself in the manner that objects in the world are. Human reality does not have a fixed nature, a collection of unchangeable qualities, but does have the perpetual obligation to make itself what it is; we are beings defined by our choices, beings that first exist and only afterwards choose the content of their existence. Thus, Sartre suggests that we should reconcile with this lack of self-identity by accepting our freedom to understand and define ourselves through the projects we freely engage with.

But what does Sartre want to convey through his rejection of human nature in general or fixed individual natures in particular? What he does not refer to by human nature is biological, genetic qualities or other arbitrary physical or mental traits, for which man has no choice over, but is born with. Apart from simply denying the existence of a universal human essence, which could be traced in all (for example that all human beings have an innate capacity of goodness), he asserts the stronger claim that for each individual, essence is something versatile and volatile; that is Sartre disputes determinism. Thus, we should better consider natures as mostly referring to fixed individual characters. Then, Sartres dismissal implies that one cannot rely on a set of fixed character traits as a reference point to provide meaning or justification for his choices Man is the author of his life. Importance should be placed on the predicate fixed, since characters do serve as explanatory means of actions or states within a particular temporal frame, yet they fail to be predictive of those, as would be the case if characters were fixed.

Let us, for instance, consider the unhappy homosexual in Sartres Being and Nothingness. He is laden with guilt due to his past homosexual experiences but does not wish to label himself as a homosexual as such. Although Sartre uses this example to indicate two different instances of bad faith, we can still educe the way in which he apprehends characters. The homosexual denies that homosexuality is part of his essence because he does not consider himself to be constituted thus in the manner of a physical object. In other words, he is unwilling to accept that his essence coincides with the nature of a homosexual and the ensuing recurrence of practising such a vice. Sartre claims that this assertion does not reflect the truth. Instead, the homosexual should express his behaviour and desire as something temporal, which has occurred in the past and may be explained as homosexuality, but nevertheless it does not constitute for him a destiny; meaning that his behaviour or desires cannot determine his being. He is free at any time to choose to stop sleeping with other men, or start dating women, or even practise abstinence. If, on the other hand, he wishes to continue his current conduct, he would have to continually choose to indulge in homosexuality.

Now, the complete lack of reference points along with being confronted with our responsibility for our choices entails a kind of discomfort and anxiety, what Sartre dubs anguish. Anguish and despair are the result of acknowledging the full responsibility that follows our freedom. For when Sartre declares that the individual subject makes or chooses herself, apart from solely asserting subjectivism, he claims moreover that in so doing she becomes a legislator of mankind; in Sartres words: In choosing myself, I choose man. The individual subject bestows upon herself the normative role of the creator of universal values and principles, in other words, creating a world for herself.

In addition, for Sartre the Being-for-itself never coincides with itself in virtue of its being an evanescent mode of existence dichotomised between facticity and transcendence. Facticity is to be understood as containing our past, contingent facts about the world external to us, which we have no choice over, our material body and our characters, which should be thought of as functions of time. However, we should regard characters from the existentialist perspective, that is, as consisting in the choices that we make and revisable projects that we pursue. On the other hand, transcendence is understood as the ability of the For-itself to project itself towards infinite future possibilities, having the capacity of not being limited by its facticity, in the sense that facticity does not prescribe such a projection; instead the For-itself surpasses all the elements of its facticity. We could say that in a sense we are trapped in an ephemeral present, not only lacking identification with our past, since we have moved beyond this, but also lacking identification with our future where both temporal offshoots include a totality of choices, beliefs, characters since we cannot yet be whatever we are going to be. Then, human reality is faced with an inherent instability within its consciousness, which is just one of the factors leading to bad faith. Notwithstanding, Sartre advocates the capability and obligation of valid coordination of these two aspects of human reality. This relation between facticity and transcendence, along with the lack of self-identity cited above, is best represented by Sartres regularly used and ambiguous phrase when referring to human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is. We could briefly and crudely decipher this as an attempt to reveal the structure of consciousness and of human reality. The For-itself is not merely defined by and constituted of a set of qualities in the same way as objects are; that is, although consciousness only exists through the body and its experiences and perceptions, it is not just that. At the same time, having the capacity to surpass both the material and temporal world the For-itself brings itself and other facts of the world into being, which otherwise could not independently exist; thus, it is what it is not.

We are now in a better position to investigate the concept of bad faith in further detail and demonstrate the different types in which it manifests itself. Sartre describes bad faith as an attempt to identify facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other. On the one hand, he suggests that we tend to consider ourselves as possessing fixed essences or characters, which inform our choices and projects, and are predetermined and uncontrollable analogously to our facticity. This is what he calls psychological determinism, the basis of all excuses. It is deemed as an external source of all our acts. On the other hand, an individual could also try to think of herself as sole transcendence. While clinging to ones transcendence to avoid her, partly or wholly, disconcerting situation, she eventually limits herself within her factual essence and the facticity of the present. A case in point is provided by Sartre, namely the woman on a date. Although she takes pleasure in the flirtatious and sexual advances of her companion, she wants the attraction to be beyond the carnal. The woman desires to be predominantly acknowledged for her intellectual and sentimental aspects and tries to detach herself from her body; yet, as Webber points out, instead of discerning an absolute awareness of her freedom, her transcendence, she ends up considering those aspects as part of her fixed nature as well as ascribing fixed attributes to her companion. Therefore, her conduct betrays her being in bad faith, while at the same time evinces that she has some kind of awareness of her freedom.

By means of such attitudes we attempt to escape our freedom to make ourselves what we are, to assign meaning and significance to events and situations, and to adopt our own value systems. It is not surprising then that this freedom and accompanying responsibility entails a considerable amount of anguish, which in turn also reveals the underlying motivation to adopt such an attitude. We hide behind psychological determinism to create excuses for ourselves, our actions, and choices. We resort to bad faith to find repose from the unfoundedness of our being. However, Sartre argues that in this effort to avoid the responsibility of our freedom, we are at the same time aware of them due to the translucency of consciousness, which is simultaneously self-consciousness; a form of awareness that he calls non-thetic awareness. For, why should we try to avoid something undesired and unpleasant if we did not know that it is so? But surely even a dim awareness of our being in bad faith might jeopardise the whole venture. We will discuss this precariousness later.

Once we consider bad faith as self-deception we are faced with a paradox and the puzzling relation between the deceiver and the deceived. Self-deception requires the role of the deceiver and that of the deceived to be played by the same individual. On the one hand, the deceiver knows the truth she is trying to hide by presenting a false belief and of course has the intention of doing so. On the other hand, the deceived has no knowledge of the falsity of the belief, nor of the deceivers intention, since this would render the deception a failure. It then seems implausible to reconcile the two conflicting roles. However, Sartre overcomes this paradox by recommending viewing self-deception more as a reflexive form of distraction, rather than a way of lying to oneself, which deems the existence of a duality in consciousness necessary. He further attempts to tackle this complication by claiming bad faith to be a project continuously pursued; a project motivated by the desire of the being-in-itself, the desire of human reality to have a fixed nature. Bad faith is perceived as a fundamental aspect of human existence and not merely a state that we can adopt or reject whenever we please. It is not a reflective, voluntary decision but a spontaneous determination of our being. Thus, we devise various strategies as instruments of distraction; we behave in certain ways or selectively interpret information about the world in support of this project; we tend to use evasive manoeuvres aimed at hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. We will explore this distraction model and its purported success in perpetuating bad faith below. Prior to that, we indicate briefly the variety of ways in which Sartre discerns bad faith.

As we have seen already, Sartre has offered several well-known examples of conducts while being in bad faith, where we can recognise the different paths one can fall into it. For our purposes we will follow Webbers categorization. In the general sense, bad faith is, as already seen, the acceptance of a fixed nature by the individual. This, nonetheless, can be subdivided into two categories. First, we have those who believe in having a fixed nature and that in fact their character agrees with that naturewhat Sartre calls sincerity. Second, there are others who also believe in having a fixed nature, yet their characters are not in accordance with the qualities within that nature. Or they might combine the two; while being sincere of some of their traits, they may employ those in an attempt to overshadow and deny one or more undesired actual traits of their character. Both of the two latter cases Webber specifies as bad faith in the restricted sense.

Apart from Sartres descriptive examples, it is not quite hard to conjure others that could represent some of those types of bad faith. Consider, for instance, the idea of death. Human beings are undoubtedly aware of their imminent and inevitable death, whether they choose to actively think of their own or others death or employ distractions in order to avoid deeper contemplation. This awareness also entails an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. We could say that death, or better, mortality is an unalterable quality of human reality; hence, it should be considered as part of our facticity, since we have no control over it. However, we choose to deny this quality or hide its displeasing truth from us so that we can carry on with our everyday lives. While we identify with some aspects of our facticity, projecting ourselves from our past rather than a continuous present, we ignore this particular one. At the same time we transcend ourselves, we project into our possibilities, contemplating our projects without taking into account their potential abrupt termination. And it seems quite implausible how an individual could endure the constant anguish induced by an ever-present awareness of ones mortality; such awareness risks leading the individual to paralysis and despair. Therefore, we live in bad faith to flee the anguish of our finitude.

Another example I would like to draw on is taken from one of Sartres plays, namely The Flies. The inhabitants of Argos are all living in bad faith, where we take bad faith in the restricted sense, as they are identifying with the social roles that were ascribed to them and deny their freedom to surpass their lives in guilt. In The Flies Sartre portrays an oppressed people that live in bad faith due to their having been conditioned to believe in their guilt for the murder of Agamemnon (although the actual perpetrators were Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, they were accountable for acquiescing to the crime) and subsequently their obligation to endlessly repent for their crime. The society of Argos is permeated by a diffuse culture of guilt that is being sustained through various cultural and social practices (such as the religious ceremony of the dead, which expanded their repentance toward all the dead, or family upbringing, hinted at by reference to an old woman and her son). These practices serve as distractions, presenting demands and expectations from the Argives, who do not passively endure this burden of guilt, but are actively and by their willing participation affecting themselves with bad faith. Thus, they are responsible for their unfree condition. Zeus refers to their fundamental freedom as the bane of gods and kings, asserting that they live in unfreedom when he says: men are freebut your subjects do not know it, and you do. They may indeed not know it but are non-thetically aware of their freedom, nonetheless. This is contrasted with Orestes acknowledgment of his possession of freedom and responsibility for his actions, along with his ensuing omnipotence, even before the gods; he owns his actions and declares: thousands of roads I tramped that brought me nowhere, for they were other mens roadstoday I have one path onlybut it is my path. Sartre employs Orestes as an example of an individual who has escaped from living in bad faith and has been leading an authentic life thereafter. Yet, the play finishes without indicating whether Orestes revelation of freedom, as an external trigger, finally urged the Argives to follow his lead.

The example from The Flies was purposefully selected in order to hint at an important dimension in Sartres concept of bad faith, namely bad faith as a social phenomenon. Although Sartre considers bad faith to manifest on an individual level, he does emphasize the social aspect of such a conduct. Such a depiction of bad faith is not at odds with Sartres theoretical work; on the contrary it can even be supported by various parts of his work. While Sartre asserts that bad faith implies in essence the unity of a single consciousness and that it does not come from outside to human reality, he nonetheless accepts the possibility that it may be conditioned by the Mit-sein like all other phenomena of human reality. Thus, we discern that although Sartre insists in the autonomy of the individual and her fundamental freedom to perpetually generate values as opposed to unearthing them to create meaning as opposed to discovering it he does make an important assertion. That is, he recognises the prospect that individuals could be influenced by their upbringing and social surroundings. Therefore, it could be the case that the individual finds herself in bad faith as a result of social conditioning; yet this does not imply that no choice over it has taken place.

We encounter further allusions to the social dimension of bad faith in another passage of Being and Nothingness: For the rest, there exist concretely alarm clocks, signboards, tax forms, policemen, so many guard rails against anguish. Following Sartres syllogism, instead of facing the fact that it is us who provide meaning to the above, we take their meaning, along with relevant proscriptions or prescriptions, as objectively existent; an attitude which he dubs seriousness. Since we are thrown into the world we find ourselves immediately immersed in situation; we grow up within societies in arbitrary historical eras and geographical areas, with particular givens corresponding to the former. Consider for example the ethical and behavioural norms of our current society, the gender-appropriateness, or sanctioned sexualities of our culture. What is more, our starting point is within some sort of social role and function, and thereafter we may or may not take up new roles or even revise them further. However, as Sartre emphasizes, all these givens appear first to our unreflective consciousness; we set off in a world that presents demands and expectations, and we choose which projects to pursue while already being in situation. Reflection and consequent awareness of freedom is only a subsequent possibility. It seems, then, that bad faith is a default position of human reality; as Webber states, bad faith is a social disease rather than an individual failing, in Sartres view, and is an ongoing condition rather than a sporadic activity.

Hence, we are inheritors of worldviews and are called at first to understand our existence within them. Inasmuch as one concedes to social pressure and does not discard the cultural givens in favour of an independent self-determination, she entertains their existence and eludes the process of challenging their demands; thus escaping anguish. Admittedly, bad faith as a project affects the way we experience things, our perception, feelings, in general our awareness; and it also distorts unpleasant evidence while accepting information that sustain the project. Therefore, within our culture we learn to regard the behaviour of others and inevitably at least initially our own as disclosing fixed characters traits. Maintaining that belief is solely dependent on the individual, yet its disownment is hindered by precautions that imprison a man in what he is.

What is being suggested above is that we employ the aforementioned material and social structures as means of distraction from positively acknowledging our freedom, wherefrom value and meaning emanates. (Recall the Argives, for instance, who incorporated familial and social practices of self-reproach and redemption into their culture as distractions; these subsequently served in perpetuating their living in bad faith for fifteen years). This brings us back to the distraction model discussed above and its plausibility of success. Note Sartres description of consciousness as translucent; this means that consciousness has awareness of its own consciousness but not in ways that linguistically articulable beliefs can be formed on that ground. The latter notion corresponds to the non-conceptual representational content of awareness. Now, let us briefly indicate how we understand these terms. We take representation to consist in the way we present and classify an object of consciousness. As for non-conceptual representation, it is a representation which lacks the necessary concepts that could render it expressible, and it cannot be linked rationally with other conceptual representations. Once we construe Sartres notion of non-thetic awareness as non-conceptual representational awareness, as Webber suggests, then the paradox of bad faith dissolves. It is representational since the individual classifies the truth of his freedom as unpleasant and undesirable, thus moves to hide it. It is moreover non-conceptual as the individual fails to rationally engage with impugning concepts or evidence with respect to the pleasing untruth they have embraced. Non-thetic awareness of our freedom and responsibility thus sustains the unity of consciousness along with providing the motivation to pursue the project of bad faith.

Conclusion

Having briefly presented the basic tenets of Sartres existentialism, we have investigated the fundamental project of bad faith, along with its various motivations for pursuit. Our non-thetic awareness of our freedom being one of them fosters the distraction model as a widespread way of preserving being in bad faith. Sartre was keen to claim bad faith as an inescapable disposition of human reality, triggered by a desire to fill our nothingness with a fixed nature, a being-in-itself. As for the origin of such a disposition and desire, one should not understand it as stemming from an ontological necessity since this would seem incompatible with Sartres rejection of determinism and the existentialist claim that existence precedes essence. Instead, acknowledging Sartres implications of the influence of upbringing, social environment and culture in the pursuit and persistence of bad faith, it then appears to me that the most cogent understanding of bad faith is as a societal pathology.

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