Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

In search of authenticity, individuality, and self-realization.

The 20th century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it mauvaise foi ('bad
faith'), the habit that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not
have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a
choice.

By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice' and failing to recognise the multitude of
other choices that are available to her, a person places herself at the mercy of the
circumstances in which she happens to find herself. Thus, the person is more akin to an
object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terminology, more akin to a
‘being-in-itself' than to a ‘being-for-itself'.

People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices
by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are
alien to their nature as conscious human beings. However, to do so is in itself to make a
choice, and thereby to acknowledge their freedom as conscious human beings.

Examples

The following examples should help to clarify these ideas.

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best
to conform to everything that a waiter should be. For Sartre, the waiter's exaggerated
behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose
essence is to be a waiter. However, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter
must at some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human
being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter.

The lesson here is that, whenever we are doing a job, we should not confuse our social
function with our own self. Our social function could be a comfortable hiding place, but
also lead us to act against our own beliefs, principles, and interests—as often happens
with politicians, when they confuse means and ends, and, losing sight of the ends, act
as though the means were the ends.
Source: Wikicommons
Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date.
The young woman's date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores
the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the
compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she
neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to
buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances.
Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she
chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby
acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

Implications
For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to
make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that
is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic
concerns, social roles, and value systems.

In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles
and value systems, a person may pretend to herself that she does not have the freedom
to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of
pretending to herself that she does not have the freedom to make choices.

Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.

Top 7 Sartre quotations

 Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat. 
 My life and my philosophy are one and the same. 
 As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can
become.
 Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
 Life begins on the other side of despair. 
 One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to
become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life. 
 Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Neel Burton M.D.

Jean Paul Sartre: The Concept of Bad Faith and its Role in
Ethical Analysis

Aakash Pydi
Mar 11, 2018 · 6 min read
Bad faith (mauvais foi) is essentially inauthenticity for Jean Paul Sartre. He thinks of bad
faith as an attempt to evade the responsibility of discovering and understanding one’s
authentic self. Bad faith is thereby an attempt to escape the freedom that Sartre believes
is an inherent feature of our lives. When Sartre says, “Consciousness is what it is not and
is not what it is,” he means that consciousness is something that is a constantly
integrated combination of facticity and transcendence which can be taken to mean the
past and future respectively.

In the section discussing the patterns of bad faith in Being and Nothing, Sartre notes
that, “The basic concept which is thus engendered, utilizes the double property of the
human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence, These two aspects of human
reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith does not wish
either to coordinate them nor to surmount them in a synthesis.” It is thereby imperative
to understand these two dimensions of human consciousness to understand bad faith.

Facticity represents all the concrete realities (or the “givens”) of an individual. For
instance, a person’s actions in the past, their childhood, their height, their school and so
on represent aspects of the person’s facticity. It can be abstractly understood as a
person’s past as his past is essentially a totality of all of the concrete occurrences that
happened to him. Transcendence is a conscious individual’s ability to transcend or
surpass the immediate situation (that represents facticity). So transcendence can be
abstractly be taken to represent the future.

One can escape bad faith if one’s notions of facticity and transcendence are coordinated
validly. An authentic individual will thereby understand that these two dimensions need
to co-exist. Bad faith thereby occurs when an individual doesn’t recognize the combined
value of these two dimensions of consciousness. So there is a self-deception involved
regarding one of these two dimensions that paves the way for bad faith. There are two
ways by which one can have bad faith.

The first way is through the affirmation of one’s facticity and the denial of one’s
transcendence. Sartre provides two examples to explain this form of bad faith.

In the first example Sartre describes a waiter in a café. He observes, “let us consider this
waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too
rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. His voice, his eyes
express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. He gives himself
the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. The waiter in the cafe plays with his
condition in order to realize it.” As Sartre points out, the waiter plays his role the way an
actor plays a role in a performance. This is a clear example of the denial of transcendence
as the waiter tries to completely commit himself to the role that he is playing. The idea of
being more than this role would completely elude him.
In the second example, Sartre describes a woman on a date with a man. The man through
his words and actions very unambiguously is looking to flirt with the woman. As Sartre
notes, “She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her
cherishes regarding her.” She must know that she has to make a decision regarding the
man’s advances eventually. However as “she does not quite know what she wants”, she
chooses to “restrict(s) his behavior to the present” and thereby denies the future
implications of the man’s flirtation. When the man finally takes her hand she is
presented with two choices. The first is to leave her hand in his, encouraging his
flirtatious advances and the second is to pull her hand back rejecting his flirtatious
advances. However the woman’s “aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as
possible” and so she ends up leaving her hand there without noticing that she is leaving it
there. By refusing to confront the obvious implications of her act she is clearly exhibiting
a denial of transcendence and the affirmation of facticity.

The second way to arrive at bad faith is through the affirmation of one’s transcendence
and the denial of one’s facticity. Sartre provides an example involving a homosexual man
to explain this form of bad faith. The homosexual man acknowledges his sexual
preference for men in the past. In Sartre’s words, “Here is assuredly a man in bad faith
who borders on the comic since, acknowledging all the facts which are imputed to him,
he refuses to draw from them the conclusion which they impose.” So he denies his
homosexuality. Even if this man has a new homosexual experience he would refer to it as
an “exception” or a “difference” and would immediately assert that this “mistake” was in
the past. He likes to believe that he is “perpetually born anew” and wishes to “avoid the
terrible judgment of collectivity.” So by refusing to accept his homosexual nature, the
man is clearly denying his facticity and is in bad faith.

For Sartre freedom is inherent to human beings. However this freedom comes with a set
of responsibilities. So this absolute and complete freedom becomes a burden for human
beings. Bad faith thereby helps a human being reject responsibility and artificially deny
his freedom or deceive himself about the idea of his freedom. This is probably why Sartre
refer to bad faith as an “immediate permanent threat to every project of the human
being.”

I think that the concept of bad faith can be very useful in ethical analysis. For me ethical
analysis is essentially solving conflicts or approaching situations with the “ethical”
objective of ensuring the long term preservation of human beings as a species. In my
opinion our understanding of the ethical must be rooted in this immortal, fundamental
and absolute objective. As we are all members of environmental, social and economic
frameworks, the aim of any ethical analogy should be to understand how to preserve
these frameworks in order to ensure the long term preservation of our species. In the
modern world it is very evident that a majority of individuals like to deny their
responsibility to themselves and consequently to their society and natural environment
due to some form of bad faith. For instance, human beings continue in self-destructive
paths of environmental, economic and social destruction due to various forms of bad
faith.
For instance, we have approximately accelerated the natural species extinction rate by a
factor of 1000 (with some estimates even reaching as high as 10000). Other man induced
destructive phenomenon such as global warming continue to seriously threaten our
survival. Economic inequality has increased substantially over the decades threatening
social and economic stability. Inclusive, collective and sustainable economic growth is a
necessary but absent reality. The list of unfortunate realities can go on. Fundamentally
the idea that self-preservation is only possible through collective preservation is simply
not acknowledged by the unthinking majority. The problem seems to be that most of us
believe that there is nothing we can do to alter these detrimental realities. Or that some
of us deny these realities and their implications. So both forms of bad faith seem to
plaguing the human race. It seems to me that we can only arrive at the right answers in
any ethical analogy if we fundamentally embrace our freedom (the capacity to choose at
every point with a balanced approach to facticity and transcendence) and then question
the status quo.

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