Sartre's second century

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 207
developed there have a permanent relevance wherever socio-political
interaction occurs, while those of the pre-war and war-time years—
organised around the en-soi (in-itself) and the pour-soi (for-itself), even if
impossible to validate scientifically or sociologically—are, with their
emphasis on choice and decision without metaphysical props or excuses, a
suitable model for the understanding of subjectivity, of seeing it from the
inside, so to speak, as well as a meaningful guide to living. 14
However they also have significance for the theme of this paper: the
notions of bad faith and essentialism. All versions of obscurantism are no
less varieties of bad faith. The first principle of obscurantism—if one may
so put it—is a closed mind, an imperviousness to evidence, a procedure in
bad faith for the indefinite multiplication of subordinate hypotheses, so as
to manufacture reasons for dismissing and ignoring manifest realities. Or,
as Lewis Carroll expresses it somewhere, believing fifty impossible things
before breakfast. In other words, obscurantism is a means of throwing
responsibility for individualised judgment onto the essentialised properties
of things and relationships, whether essentialised by the pronouncement of
external sources or simply by tradition. 15
If the obscurantism is of a superstitious sort—whether mainstream or
exotic—then a further level of bad faith is involved. In this, the
responsibility for choice and decision has been alienated to an imaginary
supernatural entity, regardless of whether that is conceived as a personal
deity or an indifferent supernatural mechanism such as karma or its less
intellectualised equivalents. The individual adherents conceive themselves
the objects of imagined forces which they may hope to influence but
cannot control, and whose commandments or oracles they cannot contradict
but have to follow or suffer the consequences.
Being and Nothingness famously ends with a declaration disclaiming
the significance of its theory, at least as elaborated there, for social or
political commitment. Nevertheless, there may be a degree of disingenuousness
here (after all it was published under the Occupation). In any
consideration of bad faith and authenticity, it is perfectly clear from
Sartre's pre-war and war-time writings that the book's conclusion does not
reflect his own attitude and that the principal targets for Sartre's contempt
are individuals convinced of their own rectitude and entitlement to their
14 See O'Donohoe, "Why Sartre Matters". There is a problem, nonetheless, in
relating this approach to the mentally incompetent, as Simone de Beauvoir hints in
relation to the insane murderers she mentions in Prime of Life, 131.
15 For example, according to the early Victorian poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, in
"The Latest Decalogue": "Thou shalt not covet, but tradition Approves all forms of
competition."