Facticity and Transcendence

Two terms have to be in place before bad faith can be stated, and Sartre never gives either a clean definition. He defines them by what they do.

In plain words. There are two true descriptions of any person, and they contradict each other. One says: here are the facts about you, your body, your past, your job, where you are sitting. The other says: none of that pins you down, because you are always relating to it and going beyond it. Sartre’s names for the two are facticity and transcendence, and every form of self-deception he describes works by using one where the other was called for.

1. The two structures

Facticity is everything already true of you: the body you have, the class you were born into, your past, your job, the fact that you are sitting in this chair rather than another. It is what you are in the manner that an object is what it is. It is given, and you did not choose most of it.

Transcendence is your escape from all of that. You are never simply your situation, because you relate to it, project beyond it, and can take up a position on it. Sartre’s own gloss, in the essay: man is constantly outside of himself, and in projecting himself and losing himself outside of himself, he makes for man’s existing. Transcendence here does not mean God. It means passing beyond.

Both are true at once. Sartre’s formulation is that these two aspects of human reality are, and ought to be, capable of a valid co-ordination.

The compressed statement of the whole account, and the sentence worth being able to reproduce exactly: human reality is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

Read that slowly. It is what it is not, because it is its possibilities, its future, its projects, none of which it currently is. And it is not what it is, because it is never simply identical with its given properties in the way a stone is identical with its properties.

2. Being-in-itself and being-for-itself

The paired vocabulary underneath. Sartre’s terms are the in-itself (en-soi) and the for-itself (pour-soi).

The in-itself is the mode of being of objects. This inkwell is an inkwell. The glass is a glass. There is no gap between the thing and itself, and Sartre calls this the principle of identity. Being coincides with itself completely.

The for-itself is consciousness, and it is defined by not coinciding with itself. Sartre’s formula: consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

That sentence is doing real work, so take it in pieces. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, which means it is never simply a thing among things. What it is conscious of includes its own lack of fixed being. There is a nothingness at its centre, and that nothingness is exactly the room in which freedom operates. A stone cannot become other than it is because there is no gap in it.

Sartre’s test of this, developed elsewhere in the excerpt, is sadness. I am sad. One might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. But if I make myself sad, I must continue to make myself sad from beginning to end. I cannot take advantage of the impetus already acquired and let it go on its way without re-creating it, nor can I carry it in the manner of an inert body which continues its movement after the initial shock. There is no inertia in consciousness. If a stranger suddenly appears, I will lift up my head and assume a lively cheerfulness, and what will remain of my sadness except that I complacently promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor.

So the sadness has to be continuously sustained. And Sartre draws the conclusion: if I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad. The being of the sadness escapes me in the very act by which I affect myself with it.

3. Consciousness as self-negation

The excerpt opens on negation, and the sequence is the ground for everything after it.

The human being is not only the being by whom negations are disclosed in the world; he is also the being who can take negative attitudes toward himself.

Sartre’s example of the outward case: in a prohibition or a veto, the human being denies a future transcendence. And he makes a point of saying this negation is not a matter of observation. My consciousness is not restricted to envisaging a negation. It constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility.

The distinction is between noticing that something is not the case, and being the negation of it. To forbid is not to observe an absence. It is to make yourself into the not of someone else’s possibility.

The No. For that reason negation must arise in the world as a No. It is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There are even men, caretakers, overseers, jailers, whose social reality is entirely that of the No, who will live and die, having forever been a No upon the earth. Others, so as to make the No a part of their very subjectivity, establish their human personality as a perpetual negation. This, Sartre says, is the meaning and function of what Scheler calls the man of resentment.

Two things to notice here for a paper.

1. The No is apprehended before the person. The prisoner does not first see a man and then infer that the man is an obstacle. He sees a No. The negation is the primary form in which the other shows up.
2. A social role can be constituted entirely by negation. The jailer’s social reality is the No. This is the first appearance in the excerpt of the theme that a role can be occupied as though it were a nature, which is what the waiter section develops.

Sartre also names irony as a subtler mode: in irony a man nihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.

That is the pattern he then goes looking for turned inward on the self, and turned inward it is bad faith.

4. Why the two structures make deception of self possible

The setup for the next page, stated here because it is the payoff of these terms.

If a person were only facticity, self-deception would be impossible, because there would be nothing to hide behind: he would simply be what he is, like the inkwell. If a person were only transcendence, it would be equally impossible, because nothing would be fixed enough to lie about.

Because a person is both, and because the two do not resolve into a stable synthesis, there is permanent room to affirm one while the other is called for. Sartre’s exact statement: 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.

He calls the resulting concept metastable, meaning subject to sudden changes or transitions. The formulae of bad faith do not constitute new, solidly structured ideas. On the contrary, they 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.

Metastable is the word to use in a paper, because it names the mechanism precisely: the structure is stable enough to hold a belief for a moment and unstable enough that no examination ever catches it.

Worked example: reading a sentence for which structure it is affirming

The exercise is to take an ordinary self-description and identify which of the two structures it asserts and which it suppresses.

“I am a shy person.” This affirms facticity: shyness is presented as a fixed property, like the inkwell’s being an inkwell. What it suppresses is that the shyness has to be continuously sustained, that it is a way of conducting oneself rather than a constitution. Compare Sartre on the coward: there is no such thing as a cowardly constitution; what makes cowardice is the act of renouncing or yielding, and a constitution is not an act.

“That is not who I really am.” Said after doing something, this affirms transcendence: I escape all that I am. Sartre’s version: thanks to transcendence, I escape all that I am. If I were only what I am, I could seriously consider an adverse criticism someone makes of me and perhaps be compelled to recognize the truth in it. But I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me. I flee myself, I leave my tattered garment in the hands of the fault-finder. What is suppressed is the facticity: the act was done, and a person is the ensemble of his acts.

The two named formulae. Sartre gives literary titles as prototypes.

• Love Is Much More Than Love establishes unity between love in its facticity, the contact of two epidermises, sensuality, egoism, and love as transcendence, the longing for the infinite. Here we leave facticity to find ourselves suddenly beyond the present and the factual condition of man.
• I Am Too Great for Myself throws us first into full transcendence in order suddenly to imprison us within the narrow limits of our actual essence. Sartre notes that this one shows transcendence changed into facticity, and is the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses.

He adds two temporal versions of the same trick, and they are worth having: the man who deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life and refuses to take into consideration the later changes is affirming that he is what he has been; the man who in the face of reproaches dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation is affirming that he is not what he has been.

The test in each case is the same. Ask which structure the sentence is standing on, then ask whether the situation called for the other one.

Vocabulary to deploy

• Facticity — everything already true of you and not chosen: body, past, class, position. What you are in the manner of a thing.
• Transcendence — your escape from all of it. Not God. Sartre’s gloss in the essay: man “is constantly outside of himself,” a “passing-beyond.”
• Being-in-itself (en-soi) — the mode of objects, complete coincidence with itself. “This inkwell is an inkwell.” Governed by the principle of identity.
• Being-for-itself (pour-soi) — consciousness, defined by not coinciding with itself. “Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”
• The formula — “human reality is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.” It is its possibilities, which it is not yet; it is never simply its given properties.
• Nihilation — consciousness does not merely observe a negation, it “constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility.”
• The No — the form negation takes in the world. “It is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard.” Caretakers, overseers, jailers, “whose social reality is entirely that of the No.”
• The man of resentment — Scheler’s figure, who makes the No “a part of their very subjectivity,” establishing the personality “as a perpetual negation.”
• Irony — a man “nihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed.” The outward version of the structure that bad faith turns inward.
• No inertia in consciousness — the sadness case. “If I make myself sad, I must continue to make myself sad from beginning to end.” A stranger appears, the head lifts, the sadness is promised “an appointment for later.”
• Metastable — Sartre’s own word, “subject to sudden changes or transitions.” The formulae of bad faith “are formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration.”
• The bad-faith operation — it does not “co-ordinate them or surmount them in a synthesis.” It “seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences,” affirming “facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity.”
• The two literary formulae — Love Is Much More Than Love (facticity fleeing into transcendence) and I Am Too Great for Myself (transcendence collapsing into facticity, “the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures”).
• The two temporal versions — the man who “deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life,” and the man who “dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation.”