From PHL217: Sartre

Bad Faith

Bad faith is Sartre’s name for lying to yourself. The whole difficulty is that when you look at it closely, it appears to be impossible.

Here is the problem in plain words. To lie, you have to know the truth and hide it from someone who does not. If you are both people at once, then you are hiding something from someone who already knows it, which is not hiding. So either self-deception does not happen, or lying is the wrong model for it. Sartre takes the second option, and the section is his attempt to say what the right model is.

The argument runs in three moves: bad faith is not lying, the obvious repair does not work, and here are two cases where it plainly happens anyway.

Two terms are assumed throughout. Facticity is everything already true of a person; transcendence is their escape from it. A person is both at once, and that is the condition that makes bad faith available.

1. Bad faith is not lying

Sartre grants that bad faith is a lie to oneself, on condition that we distinguish the lie to oneself from lying in general.

What lying is. Lying is a negative attitude, but the negation does not bear on consciousness itself; it aims only at the transcendent, meaning at something outside consciousness. The essence of the lie implies that the liar is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding. A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of; he does not lie when he spreads an error of which he himself is the dupe; he does not lie when he is mistaken.

The ideal case of the liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying the denial to himself.

Why lying needs two people. Sartre points out that the lie is a normal phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the Mit-sein, being-with others. It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my existence for the Other, and the existence of the Other for me. The liar’s project is made in entire clarity. It is sufficient that an overall opacity hide his intentions from the Other, and that the Other take the lie for truth. The lie does not involve the inner structure of present consciousness at all, so it requires no special ontological foundation.

What changes. In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. The duality of the deceiver and the deceived does not exist here. Bad faith implies in essence the unity of a single consciousness.

And then the sentence that generates the paradox: I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully, and this not at two different moments, which at a pinch would allow us to re-establish a semblance of duality, but in the unitary structure of a single project.

Sartre’s question, which the rest of the section is an attempt to answer: how then can the lie subsist if the duality which conditions it is suppressed?

One further point that is easy to skip and useful in a paper. Bad faith is not a state. One does not undergo his bad faith; one is not infected with it. Consciousness affects itself with bad faith. There must be an original intention and a project of bad faith, and this project implies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehension of consciousness as affecting itself with bad faith.

So it is something done, continuously, and not something that happens to a person. That is what makes it a moral category rather than a psychological accident.

2. Why the unconscious does not solve it

The obvious repair is to restore the two parties inside one person by putting one of them out of reach. Sartre considers the psychoanalytic move, which uses the hypothesis of a censor, conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport division, currency control, to re-establish the duality of the deceiver and the deceived.

He rejects it, and the reason is worth stating precisely because it is a structural argument rather than a dispute about evidence.

The censor has to know in order to not know. To repress successfully, the censor must identify what is to be repressed, which means it must recognize the thing as the thing to be hidden. It must therefore be conscious of it in order to be unconscious of it. The duality has not been created; it has been moved one level down and given a new name.

Instincts are neither true nor false. Sartre’s other objection: an instinct, or an original drive, is neither true nor false since it does not exist for itself. It simply is, exactly like this table, which is neither true nor false in itself. So the apparatus cannot bear the weight of a deception, which requires a relation to truth.

His conclusion on the attempt: the explanation by means of the unconscious, due to the fact that it breaks the psychic unity, cannot account for the facts which at first sight it appeared to explain. There exists an infinite number of types of behavior in bad faith which explicitly rebuff this kind of explanation, because their essence implies that they can appear only in the translucency of consciousness.

Translucency is the key property. Consciousness is transparent to itself, which is exactly why there is nowhere inside it to hide something.

3. The evanescence of bad faith

Having removed the escape route, Sartre has to say how bad faith survives at all, and his answer is that it survives badly.

If I deliberately and cynically attempt to lie to myself, I fail completely in this undertaking. The lie falls back and collapses beneath my look; it is ruined from behind by the very consciousness of lying to myself which pitilessly constitutes itself well within my project as its very condition.

So bad faith is an evanescent phenomenon which exists only in and through its own differentiation. It belongs to the kind of psychic structures Sartre calls metastable, meaning subject to sudden transitions. It vacillates continually between good faith and cynicism.

And yet: even though the existence of bad faith is very precarious, it presents nonetheless an autonomous and durable form. It can even be the normal aspect of life for a very great number of people. A person can live in bad faith, which does not mean that he has no abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith, but which implies a constant and particular style of life.

Sartre says our embarrassment then appears extreme, since we can neither reject nor comprehend bad faith. That admission is worth quoting in a paper, because it marks that the case descriptions that follow are doing the explanatory work.

4. The pattern: affirming one structure where the other is called for

The general mechanism, stated once so both cases below read as instances of it.

The basic concept utilizes the double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two aspects are, and ought to be, capable of a valid co-ordination. But bad faith does not wish either to co-ordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences. It must affirm 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.

The formulae are formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration, so that we may slide at any moment from naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa. That instability is not a defect of the strategy. It is the strategy.

Worked example: the first date

Sartre’s first case is a woman who has consented to go out with a man for the first time. Only the argumentative structure is given here; the scene itself is his.

The situation. She knows the intentions the man cherishes regarding her, and she knows that sooner or later she will have to make a decision. She does not want to feel the urgency.

Three moves, each mishandling one of the two structures.

His conduct reduced to facticity. She restricts his behavior to what is in the present, refusing to read into his phrases anything beyond their explicit meaning. She attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the speaker the immediate meanings which she imagines as objective qualities. The qualities are congealed in a permanence like that of things, projected into the strict present. His transcendence, meaning what he is projecting toward, is denied.
The desire held as not being what it is. She is profoundly aware of the desire which she inspires, and she would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect. What she wants is a feeling addressed wholly to her personality, to her full freedom, and which would be a recognition of her freedom, while at the same time being wholly desire, addressed to her body as object. So she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is; she recognizes it only to the extent that it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect.
The body abandoned to facticity while she remains transcendence. When he takes her hand, a decision is called for. To leave it there is to consent; to withdraw it is to break the harmony. Her aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. She leaves the hand there, but does not notice that she is leaving it, because at this moment she is wholly spiritual, drawing her companion up to the loftiest regions of sentimental speculation. The divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished, and the hand rests inert, neither consenting nor resisting: a thing.

What unifies the three. She has disarmed his actions by reducing them to being only what they are, that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. She permits herself to enjoy his desire only to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is. And she realizes herself as not being her own body, contemplating it as though from above, a passive object to which events can happen but which can neither provoke them nor avoid them.

Each move affirms one of the two structures exactly where the other was required.

Worked example: the waiter

The second case, and the more useful one for a paper, because it generalizes past a single encounter into how social roles are occupied.

The description. His movement is quick and studied, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice and his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. He returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton, carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope walker, putting it in a perpetually unstable equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.

The repeated “a little too” is the whole observation. Nothing he does is wrong. Everything is slightly in excess of what the task requires, because the excess is where the performance lives.

What he is doing. All his behavior seems to us a game. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing at? We need not watch long: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

Sartre’s gloss on games: a game is a kind of investigation in which one gets one’s bearings. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it. The waiter plays with his condition in order to realize it.

It is demanded of him. This obligation is not different from that imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Etiquette requires that he limit himself to his function, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a look straight in front of him which does not see at all, fixed at ten paces, since it is the regulation and not the interest of the moment that determines the point on which he must fix his eyes.

Sartre’s summary of the social fact: there are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might overflow and suddenly elude his condition.

Why he cannot simply be one. From the point of view of his own consciousness, the waiter cannot be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass.

It is not that he cannot form judgments about his condition. He knows well what it means: getting up at five o’clock, sweeping the floor before the restaurant opens, starting the coffee pot. He knows the rights it allows: the right to tips, the right to belong to a union. But all these concepts refer to the transcendent. They are abstract possibilities, rights and duties conferred on a person possessing rights, and it is precisely this person whom I have to be and who I am not.

The decisive line: it is not that I do not wish to be this person, or that I want this person to be different. There is no common measure between his being and mine. It is a performance for others and for myself, which means that I can be the waiter only by acting his part. I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I cannot be he, I can only play at being him.

Note the strangeness of that separation: not a distance, not a difference of properties, but nothing at all, and the nothing is impassable. This is the nihilation at the centre of consciousness doing its work.

What is attempted, and why it is bad faith. What I attempt to realize is a being-in-itself of the café waiter, as if it were not in my power to confer their value and their urgency upon my duties and the rights of my position, as if it were not my free choice to get up each morning at five or to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired. As if from the very fact that I sustain this role in existence I did not transcend it on every side.

And yet the facticity is real. There is no doubt that I am in a sense a café waiter, otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or a reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.

It generalizes past jobs. We are dealing with more than mere social positions. I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions. The good speaker is the one who plays at speaking, because he cannot be speaking. The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.

That last example is the sharpest, because it shows the performance actively destroying the thing performed.

The relation to sincerity

Worth having, because it is the move most students miss and it is where the section is genuinely radical.

Sincerity looks like the antidote to bad faith. Sartre argues it is the same structure.

Sincerity presents itself as a requirement and consequently is not a state. What is the ideal to be attained? It is necessary that a man be for himself only what he is. But is this not precisely the definition of the in-itself, the principle of identity?

To posit as an ideal the being of things is to assert at the same time that this being does not belong to human reality, and that the principle of identity is not a universal axiom but a synthetic principle enjoying a merely regional universality.

So the maxim “one must be what one is” does not serve solely as a regulative principle for judgments. It posits an ideal of being, and proposes an absolute conforming of being with itself. If man is what he is, bad faith is forever impossible and candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being.

The upshot: the demand to be sincere is a demand to be an object. Sartre’s formulation of the resulting obligation is deliberately paradoxical: it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are. What are we, then, if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are?

Vocabulary to deploy

The distinction from lying

Lying aims outward — “this negation does not bear on consciousness itself; it aims only at the transcendent.”
The liar possesses the truth — “A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of.” The ideal liar is “a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and denying the denial to himself.”
Lying needs two people — it is a phenomenon of the Mit-sein, being-with. It “does not involve the inner structure of present consciousness.”
What changes — “in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. Thus the duality of the deceiver and the deceived does not exist here.”
The paradox — “I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully… in the unitary structure of a single project. How then can the lie subsist if the duality which conditions it is suppressed?”
Not a state — “One does not undergo his bad faith; one is not infected with it; it is not a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith.” There must be “an original intention and a project of bad faith.”

Against the unconscious

The censor must know in order not to know — to repress selectively it has to identify what is to be repressed. The duality is relocated, not removed.
Instincts cannot lie — an instinct “is neither true nor false since it does not exist for itself. It simply is, exactly like this table.”
Translucency — bad faith appears “only in the translucency of consciousness,” which is why there is nowhere inside to hide anything.

How it survives

Evanescent — the cynical attempt “falls back and collapses beneath my look; it is ruined from behind by the very consciousness of lying to myself.”
Metastable — it “vacillates continually between good faith and cynicism,” and yet “can even be the normal aspect of life for a very great number of people,” implying “a constant and particular style of life.”

The cases

The date, move one — his conduct reduced to facticity: qualities “congealed in a permanence like that of things,” restricted “to what is in the present.”
The date, move two — the desire recognized “only to the extent that it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect.”
The date, move three — “the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished,” the hand left “neither consenting nor resisting, a thing,” while she is “wholly spiritual.”
The waiter — “his movement is quick and studied, a little too precise, a little too rapid.” The repeated a little too is the observation.
Playing at being — “he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The child plays with his body “to explore it”; the waiter plays with his condition “in order to realize it.”
The dance of the grocer — “A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer.” Also the soldier-thing with the look “fixed at ten paces.”
The social fact — “there are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it.”
Not like the inkwell — he “cannot be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass.”
Separated by nothing — “I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I cannot be he, I can only play at being him.”
The formula — “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.”
It generalizes — “The good speaker is the one who plays at speaking, because he cannot be speaking.” The attentive pupil “so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.”

Sincerity

Sincerity is the same structure — its ideal is “that a man be for himself only what he is,” which “is precisely the definition of the in-itself.”
The demand to be an object — “one must be what one is” posits “not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being.”
The resulting paradox — “it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are.”