JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Bad faith205of Bouville in Nausea and Kean in the play of that name. In the biographiesBaudelaire and Saint Genet: Comedian and Martyr the self-justifyingbourgeois hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century poet is contrasted with therecognition of freedom by the thieving and streetfighting proletarianhomosexual playwright from Brest. Genet’s disreputable and criminalbehaviour is eulogised by Sartre as a model of good faith – the real exerciseof freedom. Baudelaire’s law abiding conformity is condemned as the denialof freedom – bad faith. Sartre’s distinction between the moral and the immoralcuts across socially acceptable legal and ethical mores. The moral is thefree and authentic; the immoral is the conformist, the obsequious, theinauthentic.Sartre says bad faith is a lie to oneself. This raises the philosophicalparadox of self-deception because I know I am free but I hide my freedomfrom myself. In some sense, I both know and do not know I am free. How isthis possible?Sartre rejects one solution straight away: the psychoanalytical idea thatthere exists both a conscious and an unconscious mind. The Freudianallows that we know something unconsciously but remain ignorant of it anddeny it consciously, and so dissolves the paradox of self-deception. Sartrecan not possibly follow this route because it is a central tenet of his theory ofconsciousness that no unconscious exists. Sartre’s phenomenology impliesthat every mental state is necessarily a conscious state.Sartre’s solution is as follows. The respect in which I know I am free isdifferent from the respect in which I do not know I am free. I know that I amfree in that I have the capacity to make choices. However, I mask this capacityfrom myself by the adoption of everyday roles, by conforming to the fixedimage others have of me, by pretending to be a mechanism or a thing. I amfully possessed of the propositional knowledge of my own capacity to actfreely but behave rigidly to prevent the realisation of that capacity. I pretend Iam not free.In bad faith I am in relation to myself as the actor is to Hamlet. We are allactors. An actor knows he is an actor but in so far as he performs he is nothis real self. In bad faith I know I am free but adopt a role which masks myfreedom. Bad faith is a representation for others and for myself. Paradoxically,human reality is what it is not (its authentic self-defining project) and is notwhat it is (its hypocritical social role).Sartre distinguishes between two kinds of people in bad faith. One kindhe calls ‘cowards’ (‘les lâches’). They hide from their freedom in a facade of