Is Bad Faith possible?

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

I believe bad faith is not only possible but inevitable; however I will refrain from giving my justification of this statement until we have looked at a few areas. Firstly, exactly what is meant by “bad faith” and the logical problems that this entails, then the different patterns of bad faith that arise and finally any proposed resolutions of bad faith.

Basically, Sartre said, bad faith is self deception, and this is a kind of lie, a lie we tell ourselves. Thus, it can be said it should exhibit all the structure of lies in general. Any lie involves two sides: The Deceiver and The Deceived. Don’t forget I’m talking about a lie that works. Sometimes, of course, an attempt at lying doesn’t succeed and no one is fooled. The conditions for a successful lie are:

(1) The Deceiver knows the truth he is lying about. If he doesn’t, he’s not really lying; he’s just mistaken.

(2) The Deceived doesn’t know the truth.

In the case of self-deception, the lie to oneself, this simple and unproblematic structure becomes paradoxical. This is where bad faith encounters a lot of problems. Because, the deceiver is the deceived. Thus, one and the same person both knows the truth and doesn’t know the truth, and that is a contradiction.

Sartre attempts to avoid the paradox by affirming that both lie and bad faith are negative attitudes and that falsehood has basically the same phenomenological structure as bad faith in such that there exists acts of lying. He also asserts that there exists a basic difference between them. This being, the negation that exists in a lie is directed towards a transcendent other, and not to one's consciousness itself as in the case of bad faith. It thus affirms fourfold aspects of existence: of myself, of the other, of myself in relation to the other and of the other in relation to myself.

In fine, the duality of the deceiver and the deceived in a lie is rooted in a distinction of subjectivities. This characteristic of lying in general makes facile the act of hiding the truth from the other. Secondly, the liar possesses the truth in its totality in so far as he is able to hide it from the other. Sartre then concludes that he is willing to grant that bad faith is a lie to oneself, with the prerequisite of a distinction between lying to oneself and lying in general. Emphasising the fact that lying in general, is not necessarily the same as bad faith.

Sartre says, the Freudian notion of an unconscious is frequently appealed to as a way of avoiding this paradox. “To escape from these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious.”(Sartre 1943:50)

However when dealing with bad faith we get one of Sartre’s most sustained attacks on the notion of the Freudian unconscious. But what I want to show here is not that there is no such thing as a Freudian unconscious. I am arguing instead that, even if there were, that wouldn’t help one bit to get around the contradiction we are talking about.

Freud’s theory of the unconscious starts with the Id. This is an unorganised mass of drives and instincts. It is ruled by The Pleasure Principle. All the drives and instincts in this pool seek to be fulfilled, satisfied. As consciousness develops, a part of the Id becomes organised, and the psyche begins to develop. This organised region of the Id is called the Ego. The Ego is ruled by another principle: The Reality Principle. The Reality Principle is what tells the psyche to wait to satisfy those Id drives until the appropriate time.

Now, although it looks at first as though the Id and the Ego are in conflict, they really aren’t. The Ego is a sub-region of the Id (the organized part), and is really at the service of the Id. The third structure Freud identified is “the Superego.” It is a subpart of the Ego, and is what we normally call the conscience. Certain Id drives are so strong and so dangerous to the long-term health of the psyche that the Ego, in its special function as the Superego, denies them.

How does this apply to Sartre’s discussion of ...

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How does this apply to Sartre’s discussion of Bad Faith? Certain drives or instincts are so dangerous that not only should they not be satisfied, but they should not even be allowed into consciousness. They are just too dangerous! So the whole point of the evasive manoeuvres is to keep consciousness, which is to say, the Ego (or Superego) from becoming aware of what is really going on in the Id. The Ego is deceived.

But, Sartre says, it won’t work, because what does the censoring? On Freud’s own theory, it is the Ego that does this, the Id certainly isn’t going to repress, censor, resist, its own drives. It doesn’t want to hide anything. It has to be the Ego that does the resisting. And in order to do this resisting effectively, the Ego must know exactly what is going on.

It must know what it is that cannot be allowed into consciousness, in order to be able to take appropriate evasive action when necessary. So the Ego, with its conscious Ego processes, is also supposed to be exactly what does not know what is going on. It is supposed to be fooled.

All the Freudian machinery of the mind has not succeeded in avoiding the paradox. We are left now with the Ego that both knows and does not know the truth. In short, the contradiction has not been avoided; it has only been localized.

But McCulloch states “there is nothing odd about the censor resisting analysis, since its aim is to prevent the ego from knowing the truth. This need not involve self deception” (McCulloch 1994:55). But instead talks of how a psychoanalytical appeal to the unconscious “threatens unity of the agent as a psychic entity” (McCulloch 1994:56) because each of us would contain two or three agents in each of our bodies.

The first pattern of bad faith is what Sartre calls the metastable concept of transcendence-facticity. On the phenomenological level, this consists primarily in deferring the moment of decision. When a person is confronted with the challenge to choose, the usual tendency is to postpone the moment of decision for in so doing, he avoids the responsibility corresponding to his choice. He does not want to take accountability for his existence and this he does by means of indulging in life-patterns devoid of commitment. On a deeper ontological level, such a pattern of bad faith consists in confusing transcendence and facticity. The possibility of bad faith of this kind is rooted in man's being at once a facticity and transcendence. Man is a facticity in so far as he is condemned to be in the world, he is transcendence in so far as he is free to project himself. This model of bad faith is committed when one considers facticity as transcendence, and transcendence as facticity: “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.”(Sartre 1943: 56)

The second pattern of bad faith is rooted in interplay between man's being for himself and his being for others. Every human act has a double aspect; it can be seen both by the one who performs the act and the other. This duality of human act makes possible the phenomenon of bad faith. This we find when Sartre says, "The equal dignity of being, possessed by my being-for-others and by my being-for-myself permits a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others, and from the for-others to the for-itself." .(Sartre 1943: 58) The ambiguous interaction between the for-itself and the for-others is made manifest in affirming at once that one is what he has been and one is not what he has been. On the one hand, man "deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life and refuses to take into consideration the later changes." (Sartre 1943: 58)

By absolution of his facticity through considering himself an immutable and finished product, he then refuses to face the responsibility for his existence. On the other hand, man "in the face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation."(Sartre 1943: 58) He then flees from answering for what he has been by seeking refuge in the absolution of his transcendence.

The third and final pattern of bad faith is one of viewing one's self as other, by permanently assuming one's role, thereby transforming oneself to the mode of being-in-itself. Society demands that each member have a role to play in the proper functioning of society. Sartre presents as an example a waiter in a café who has applied himself to a portrayal of his role as a waiter. The waiter is guilty of bad faith because "the waiter in the café can not be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass.”.(Sartre 1943: 59)

The waiter cannot assume the being of a waiter because he is primarily more than just a waiter; he is man. Sartre explains:

It is precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter in question) and who I am not. It is not that I do not wish to be this person or that I want this person to be different. But rather there is no common measure between his being and mine. It is a "representation" for others and for myself, which means that I can be he only in representation. But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I can not be he, I can only play at being him; that is, imagine to myself that I am he. And thereby affect him with my nothingness. . (Sartre 1943: 60)

One of the primary problems you can see with the notion of bad faith is its seeming inescapability. If we do accept bad faith as possible, given the virtually universal failing aspect of it, how can one escape it? Sartre seems to suggest that we can throw off bad faith through a Herculean effort of freedom. It would seem though, that such an effort would ultimately be doomed to bad faith through its own self-reflected nature. I would be in bad faith when I thought “I am throwing off bad faith".

Could sincerity assist us in escaping this apparent entrapment of bad faith? Not according to Sartre, since sincerity is always something to strive for, possessing it must be an unconscious act. This is not to say that it is impossible to be honest, far from it. The problem lies in assuming that when we are being sincere, we perceive ourselves as we really are. When we reflect upon our honesty and say to ourselves "I am sincere", then we fall into the trap of bad faith. Once we say to ourselves, "I am sincere", we lose the measure of our sincerity. Sartre gives as his example the homosexual and his plain-spoken friend. The homosexual regrets his orientation and does everything in his power to avoid having to confront the awful truth about his sexual preference. His friend is disgusted by the homosexual's lack of candour and demands that he admits his sexual preference and accepts it. It is fairly easy to see that the homosexual is deceiving himself by his refusal to accept the circumstances of his sexuality. But Sartre faults the friend even more for engaging in bad faith, because the homosexual is attempting to retain his freedom of action. His "sincere" friend, on the other hand, is only interested in placing him in his "proper" category. This mania for correct classification is one of Sartre’s key signs of bad faith, since it reduces free individuals to the level of masses lumped in categories.

Then Sartre looks at a man who does not label others “champion of sincerity”. (Sartre 1943: 64), but concentrates only on his own flaws. Sartre says he does not avoid bad faith he is just as estranged from his reality as a free individual as the meddlesome friend, for in this case he is both sinner and friend. Plainly put, by saying "I am a bad man", one embraces evil as a defining and limiting characteristic for one's own self, thereby denying that goodness may be an option that can be exercised at any time. Good faith sincerity is backward-looking. I can only authentically speak with sincerity of past events, due to the fact that I am focusing on those past events and not my present state of mind.

When McCulloch looks at sincerity he argues there is no self deceit involved in “a willingness to speak plainly about the overall tendency of one’s ways as evidenced by past behaviour” (McCulloch 1994:62) The friend of the homosexual is just noticing a pattern of behaviour, which could be freely chosen, and pointing out that the rationalisation which risks breaking this pattern is inaccurate.

Sincerity in this sense should not be regarded as being in bad faith and any attempt at presenting it as so, is using a play on words. McCulloch questions how Sartre’s reasons for the occurrence of self deception, (trying to convince ourselves that we are both being in-itself and for-itself or denying past deeds to try and seek shelter in freedom) are applicable to “our alleged failure to confront the fact we are subject to anguish” (McCulloch 1994:63). He believes the solution lies within how we go between the two forms of being, whether it is something we deliberately engineer or whether it comes about because of confusion amongst the two forms of being. If it is the latter then any paradoxical notion of self deception is solved because it has all occurred over a conceptual or logical muddle.

But if it is that we deliberately engineered the confusions in order to avoid the anguish encountered from extreme freedom, then in order for the confusions to work we would have to believe in the confusions that have been engineered. In doing this we would have to embark upon another project of self deception, thus resulting in the paradoxical problems we have seen from the beginning of this essay.

Now if we take the second muddle explanation and review the example of the homosexual and champion of sincerity we can change our analysis of them. The homosexual’s friend can be accused of being confused over the two-facedness of being providing that his sincerity adheres to the correct notion of sincerity that I discussed before. For the homosexual McCulloch says he “may have some ideal of human sexuality which he cannot bear himself not to live up to: hence guilt and self deception, but no bad faith over freedom” (McCulloch 1994:64) so the notion of self deception here has no paradoxical problems. The champion of sincerity could just be confused over the matter of unchangeable human nature and would therefore have no self deception but bad faith over freedom.

Sartre’s example of the homosexual allows us to ask “either bad faith is non self deceiving muddle over the two fadedness of being, or it is engineered and hence self deceiving muddle” (McCulloch 1994:64) if the latter is the case then the problem of self deception has been left completely unanswered.

To conclude, all three patterns of bad faith have one thing in common: they are rooted in a contradiction that inheres in consciousness. The human reality is one characterised by dialectic of facticity and transcendence, of being what it is not and not being what it is, of a relation to the other and a relation to the Self. The resulting synthesis is a complicated gathering of contradictory phenomena. The human person therefore becomes a battleground between opposing forces. The resulting instability becomes itself the very condition for the inevitability of bad faith. Whatever position man takes, he is haunted with the said phenomenon. What complicates the problem of bad faith is the fact that bad faith is itself faith. Sartre holds that taking into consideration the nature of consciousness, belief and non-belief are but two sides of the same coin:

But the nature of consciousness is such that in it the mediate and the immediate are one and the same being. To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe. Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to believe - this in the unity of one and the same non-thetic self-consciousness.(Sartre 1943: 69)

Is bad faith then a vain phenomenon? At first glance, this may seem to be the case. On the contrary, the very contradiction that exists in bad faith is itself the very possibility of bad faith. The unitary structure of consciousness makes possible the phenomenon of bad faith. Is there a way out of this ontological deadlock? Early Sartre holds that there is none. Still, he paradoxically admits the possibility of good faith, even if this is just on a phenomenological level.

References.

Sartre, J.P 1943. Being and Nothingness, Routledge press.

McCulloch, G. 1994. Using Sartre: An analytical introduction to early Sartrean themes, Routledge press.