JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

11 Bad faithThe reality of our freedom is so unbearable that we refuse to face it. Insteadof realising our identities as free conscious subjects we pretend to ourselvesthat we are mechanistic, determined objects. Refusing to freely makeourselves what we are, we masquerade as fixed essences by the adoptionof hypocritical social roles and inert value systems. This denial of freedomis called by Sartre ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi). Almost a secularisation of theChristian Fall, bad faith is pervasive.It is depicted in merciless detail in Sartre’s fiction and in the chapter onbad faith from Being and Nothingness, partly reprinted below, which containsthe locus classicus: a café waiter whose exaggerated movements andaffected manner make it clear that he is playing at being a café waiter.Several kinds of bad faith are displayed by the waiter. He behavesmechanically as though he were a thing rather than a person. He is acting arole, playing a part. His relationship to himself is as false as that of an actorto his part in a play. His behaviour is a display before others, a set of routineswhich make him comfortable in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.In another of Sartre’s examples, the soldier at attention is in bad faithwhen he turns himself into a mechanical soldier-thing with a fixed unseeinggaze. A woman on a date with a certain man for the first time is presentedwith the moment of choice. The man takes her hand. For her to leave herhand in his is to choose a sexual direction for the relationship. To withdrawit is to reject this possibility. Instead of choosing, instead of exercising herreal choice, she refuses to face it, leaving her hand to rest, neither acceptingnor rejecting: a thing.Sartre’s philosophical literature is strewn with characters in bad faith:Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord, Hugo in Dirty Hands, the bourgeoisie