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The Reading

Read Chapter Two of Sartre’s masterpiece Being and Nothingness. The chapter is entitled “Bad Faith” and it explores the ways that human beings try to evade ethical responsibility for their actions. Be forewarned. This reading is difficult. For that reason, I’ve kept it down to a manageable length, on the expectation that you will work through it as best you can. Consider how often you, your friends or acquaintances practice the different forms of bad faith and self-deceit. Once you’re finished, see if you’ve really understand the existentialist agenda by answering the following questions.

Questions to Consider

1. How does Sartre describe consciousness?

2. Why is consciousness defined in terms of negation?

3. How are human beings capable of lying to themselves?

4. Why is the liar doubly guilty? How is this different when a person practices self-deceit?

5. Why does Sartre want us to take self-deceit seriously as an unethical activity?

6. How does psychoanalysis aid and abet immoral, or at least irresponsible, attitudes and behaviour?

7. Why is psychoanalysis nothing more than an experimental and distrustful idea?

8. What would need to objectively exist before we could begin to entertain the validity of psychoanalysis? What does Sartre suggest this means?

9. Why is Sartre so eager to have people take responsibility for their repressions?

10. Why is the so-called truth of psychoanalysis really a form of self-deceit?

11. What does existentialism affirm with respect to human nature?

12. How does Sartre’s example of the frigid woman illustrate this point?

13. What are the clues that someone is engaged in patterns of thinking and behaviour that are characterized by bad faith?

14. What is the deceitful game that many lovers play with one another?

15. What simple example does Sartre provide to show us how the game is played?

16. Why is there no such thing as a totally genuine emotion for Sartre?

17. How does our knowledge of others help us to practice self-deceit?

18. How does Sartre characterize this kind of negation? Does he find anything positive in it?

19. How does Sartre characterize the closet homosexual?

20. While sincerity and authenticity are, in the common sense of those terms, good qualities, Sartre has no time for those who advocate constant sincerity. What’s he getting at?

21. What does Sartre mean when he says that “the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief”?

22. How much of a problem is self-deceit for Sartre’s existentialism?

23. What is Sartre’s, and existentialism’s, solution to the problem of bad faith and self-deceit?

24. What term or concept does Sartre use in the footnote ending the discussion of bad faith that might sum up the bundle of qualities that a modern ethical man and woman should have? What does this tell you about the major analytical thrust of the existentialists?

Possible Answers

1. Consciousness implies the ability contemplate to contemplate one’s own negation or meaninglessness. Humans are the only ones who can observe themselves and their actions with ironic detachment. To this extent, humans are subjective creatures and have considerable freedom from their environment, even if it is only to say No.

2. Human beings are the only creatures who can take negative attitudes towards their environment and even towards themselves

3. Humans are capable of negating or denying who they really are because of the phenomenon of transcendence. Humans cannot be defined or circumscribed as totally objective characters because they are always in the process of becoming something else. This human condition makes it difficult for people to pin themselves or others down. It also allows people to self-consciously deceive others and to half persuade themselves that they are something other than they really are.

4. The liar knows the truth he/she is hiding and is in complete comprehension of the lie that he is using to his own advantage. In the case of self-deceit, the liar is lying to himself or herself. Although this differs from an out and out lie, it is typically done in bad faith. It is a project meant designed from the outset to conceal the truth. Yet it is normal in the sense that many people do this a lot. For the majority of people, it is even “a constant and a particular style of life.”

5. Self-deceit allows individuals to elude responsibility for their actions. It creates a divided self where no such self does or should exist.

6. Psychoanalysis reifies the divided self and, therefore, provides a rationale for bad faith. By creating the Id and disconnecting it from the Ego, Freud created a divided self that could lie to itself without even feeling guilty.

7. It replaces our subjective selves, and our intuitions about who we are, with abstractions. These conceptual abstractions make it even more possible to hide from ourselves, a practice that comes naturally to many people. By blaming things on the id or the subconscious, clinical psychologists and patients collude with one another in bad faith.

8. In order for the relationship between the Id and the Ego to work, there needs to be a censor present who prevents the information in the subconscious from reaching the conscious mind. Clearly, for Sartre, no such censor exists. The individual hides the information from himself or herself. The individual must actively repress information that it was, at least in the beginning, fully conscious of. This means that the individual is responsible for that repression and knows the truth.

9. Human beings only have dignity and ethical character to the extent that they have free will and to the extent that they take full responsibility for exercising their free will. Psychoanalysis turns people into beings that are manipulated by their human nature and emotions, and are neither free nor responsible.

10. The real truth is not the repression but the information that is being repressed. Psychoanalysis avoids the ethical problem by dividing up the self and allowing individuals to disguise the truth and hide from themselves.

11. Existentialism affirms the unity of consciousness and the potential for clarity of consciousness among mature, independent and ethical human beings.

12. The frigid woman, a typical case study in psychoanalysis, is immature and unethical. She denies her emotions; she hides from her responsibilities; and she denies the psychic unity that makes her independent from nature. In other words, she acts in bad faith.

13. These individuals need to adopt various procedures to maintain their charade. Thus, they must discover other explanations for their actions than the most obvious ones. They transform immediate and obvious meanings into complex, convoluted and theoretical ones. They deny both the moment and their own being. They constantly practice the kind of ambiguity that allows them to flee from confronting reality. This is especially true of the way that people in relationships handle love. It is sentimentalized, romanticized, idealized t the point where its sexual aspect can often be totally obscured. [Sartre, a genuine chauvinist exposes the bad faith of women in relationships who want to be loved for their minds; but it is important to stress that men in relationships practice similar forms of bad faith and, in fact, can even deceive themselves about loving a woman when what they are really after is a sexual connection.]

14. They jump back and forth between interpretations of themselves as a “being-for-myself” and as a “being-for-others” to increase the number of possibilities and maximize their own advantage in the relationship. This escape from inner feelings to social roles is, of course, to some extent unavoidable. But when it is done to confuse and manipulate oneself or others, it constitutes bad faith. Many lovers continually invent and reconstruct themselves and their feelings in ways that make the concept of a “pure heart” – which they earnestly strive to project, of course – totally ridiculous. Lovers constantly profess their “candour” when honesty is exactly what most of them are trying to avoid. Perhaps that’s why lovers have so little trust in one another and constantly probe for inconsistencies and the lack of authenticity.

15. The café waiter, whose every gesture and expression, is playing a role. While we cannot avoid playing roles in society, waiters [and some manipulative lovers] so detach themselves from their actions and statements as to appear to be machines. This may be acceptable in a waiter, since the public demands the ceremony, but it is totally unacceptable and irresponsible in relationships between lovers or other serious social roles that one is called upon to play.

16. None of us simply feel emotions. If that were true, we would be our emotions. Instead, we assemble or align our conduct to entertain and reflect sadness. This is a form of drama or a theatrical conduct. It doesn’t mean that we cannot be objectively sad in the common sense of the term, but it does mean that there will always be some tension between that impulse and the process by which we continue to “make ourselves sad from beginning to end.” The deceiver of the self and others, however, does not stay with the common sense definition of sadness, but exploits it in such a way as to hide his true feelings from himself and others. A truly honest person, at a funeral for example, will feel and admit the disconnection between feelings and roles that distinguishes a free and developing consciousness. The self-deceiver will exploit it in order to abdicate any personal responsibility.

17. The intelligent person also knows that the consciousness of others is not static either and that, ultimately, no one is absolutely sincere. That is a fact of life since consciousness is always in transcendence and is what it is not. But the self-deceiver plays upon this to suggest that sincerity is a task impossible to achieve. Therefore, the self-deceiver abdicates responsibility for his/her own lack of sincerity. Since no one can “be what one is”, they think that it is acceptable to be irresponsible and inconsistent.

18. When done in bad faith, the negation of the self and others lacks any redeeming quality. It transforms human beings into nothings and replaces any form of human meaning with emptiness. Introspection may depend upon the ability to negate, but it should not be used as a game to destroy all meaningful communication between people.

19. The homosexual, as described by Sartre, is an individual who seeks transcendence. He/she refuses to have his/her personality labeled as an object, i.e. the pederast. This is natural. But it becomes a form of self-deceit if the individual remains in the closet and wants to project himself/herself as something other than a homosexual.

20. An extreme emphasis on sincerity, such as the person who wants the homosexual to constantly proclaim his/her homosexuality, is a manipulator. No one can be objectified totally, so the champion of sincerity is someone with a hidden agenda, a person who wants to control others. Whereas the self-deceiver hides from responsibility in various distortions of subjective reality, the aggressive undeceiver wants to turn everyone into an object for his/her manipulation. Just because people act out of bad faith that does not mean that the remedy is total sincerity. Total sincerity is not only impossible, but it is yet another form of bad faith.

21. Like all belief systems, bad faith creates a paradigm or world-view that is as dogmatic as any religious system. While entering into bad faith, like a religious cult, involves a conscious decision, once inside bad faith, these attitudes are mutually reinforced and anything remotely resembling objectivity becomes impossible. While self-deceit differs from a cynical lie, it is very dangerous to the extent that it allows people to evade responsibility for who they are.

22. It is a huge problem because it strikes at the very heart of human dignity and undermines ethical responsibility. “Bad faith,” writes Sartre, “is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being.” It is much more of a threat than lying or violence because, while the latter are less commonplace, “consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith.” This is because Sartre’s ontological study of consciousness reveals that it is free and can never be totally captured.

23. Existentialists want to force people to accept responsibility for all their choices and to act with integrity. This implies a certain amount of consistency in behaviour and the ability to make difficult decisions and to face the fallout maturely. Existentialism can take different forms, i.e. Camus’ search for balance and avoiding of extremes or Sartre’s adoption of the best system available at any given time period. But its character is extremely masculine in the sense that it affirms the individual standing apart from and, if necessary, against a potentially hostile world. Not surprisingly, this quintessentially modern ethical paradigm was refined during the Second World War, when French members of the resistance, such as Camus and Sartre, were heroic protagonists in a terrifying world. One of the critiques of existentialism, therefore, is that it obscures other values such as sympathy, sentiment and caring. Another is that existentialists have been too eager to separate mankind from nature and the environment in their desire to affirm the freedom of the will, even if only in negation. Finally, feminist and other critics find the existential position too harsh in its ethical condemnation of those who suffer from various psychoses, which are sometimes more humanely looked upon as diseases to be treated rather than manifestations of bad faith.

24. The concept is that of authenticity, which Sartre goes on to develop in other parts of his work. Sartre describes authenticity as “self recovery”, a concept that reveals how much the existentialist agenda is based upon the foundation of an individual and independent self. Sartre believes that free will and independence need to be rescued and elevated into principles if a new and vibrant humanism is going to be created. Whereas the humanism of the Renaissance was based on human communities, existentialism as a new humanism is an extremely individualist ethical philosophy.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have now finished all the readings for an admittedly difficult course. I hope you enjoyed it and think about the themes and issues from time to time. Best of luck on the final exam and in your present or future endeavours.