In chapter 2 of Part 1 in Being and Nothingness, Sartre gives an illuminating account of one of the most intriguing conditions possible to a human: bad faith. Bad faith is often called lying to oneself, self-deception, or denying to oneself the truth of something one "really" knows is true. How such self-deception is possible baffles psychologists, philosophers and laypeople alike. Just how can one convince oneself that something is true when one knows it is not true? Here we will examine in more detail what bad faith is according to Sartre, and what conditions, in his analysis, make it possible to reconcile the contradiction pondered in the fore-mentioned question.
As an example to illustrate bad faith, Sartre describes the situation and behavior of a young woman on a date with a man, a man whom she knows has sexual desire for her. She is not ready to make a decision concerning his desire, whether to accept it and consummate it, or to totally reject it. Thus she does what she can, in her mind and behavior, to put off the decision as long as possible.
The first technique she uses to put off the man’s advances is to simply not acknowledge them, both in her behavior and on a more "superficial layer" of consciousness, if you will. If the man says to her "I find you so attractive!" she would take the statement only at face value. She would think that this statement has no sexual connotations, or as only pointing to a possibility to perhaps fulfill in the far future, rather than at once. She only officially recognizes the man’s advance "to the extent it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, [and] respect"(97). However, at the same time, on a deeper level, she knows that this man has sexual feelings for her. Throughout her act of innocence and propriety she is still aware of his desire, and she enjoys it. Thus there is both a knowledge and a denial of that knowledge occurring in her consciousness. She is in bad faith. How can this be?
Sartre presses on, exposing more visibly her bad faith in the next development of the scene. Sartre supposes that the man takes the woman’s hand. Now what is the indecisive woman to do? If she shows any acknowledgement of leaving her hand, then she consents to the flirting. Yet if she retracts her hand, then she indicates displeasure toward the man’s advances and "break[s] the troubled and unstable harmony"(97) of the hour. She enjoys his advances but does not wish to decide at once what to do about them. So she decides to leave her hand "but does not notice that she is leaving it"(97). Moreover she retreats from the level of body by becoming all intellect, all personality, all consciousness, by speaking of "Life, her life," etc. (97) and of other lofty philosophical speculation.
There are two important components of her reaction to scrutinize. First, in the act of keeping her hand inert, she is also regarding it as a passive object in the world, as if it had no connection to her. However, implicit in her choice to let the hand remain, (and to consciously keep the hand "lifeless" I might add), she must have an awareness of her body as part of her body. She is necessarily aware that part of being human is the facticity of body. Yet while aware of this facticity, she climbs the heights of intellect, actively denying her body as a part of her, insisting on her being essentially a consciousness.
Second, implicit in her "rising to all intellect" she is contemplating one of the important facts of her human condition, the transcendent nature of her consciousness. As a consciousness with free will, she is not merely what she is in a given moment; she is all the possibilities she may choose. In this situation, as she becomes all intellect, she also contemplates the fact that she really could be having and/or can always have an intellectual conversation with the man. Concurrently she tries to make this transcendence, this possibility, into a partial actualization, a partial facticity, that she is having an exclusively intellectual conversation. This attempt is evident in her behavior, namely in her lofty speculation. Nonetheless, throughout her posturing as engaging in such a discourse, she still knows that there is more to the moment than all intellect, that there is the sexual desire of the man that she enjoys.
Let us recap and summarize these discoveries. Through her hand’s passivity, she reveals a simultaneous awareness and denial of her body. Through rising in the intellect and attempting to make a transcendent possibility somehow be a facticity, she officially denies the reality of the sexual advance, all the while secretly believing and enjoying that reality.
How is it possible that the woman can commit all these contradictions all at once? Sartre asserts there are two conditions, two truths, that allow her to act and think as she does. One crucial condition, as described to some extent already, is the condition of man being both a facticity and a transcendence. The other condition is the dual and self-destructive nature of the faith in bad faith.
Let us first look at the facticity-transcendence relationship. A human has qualities of facticity in two main related ways. One is that a person has a body, which is a being-in-itself. A body is a body in the same way an inkwell is an inkwell; it simply is self-sufficiently itself. The other way is that, whenever a person chooses to behave with that body, the person is at that time what it is that s/he behaves as. In the act of pursuing a choice, a person is that choice for the duration of that choice, and that duration becomes a facticity of the past, an unalterable part of history. Thus a person’s facticity includes the person’s body and the person’s past.
Facticity, however, is not all that a person is. Humans are unique among the things in the world because we are also, even more fundamentally than our factual aspects, transcendent beings. This transcendence, like facticity, occurs in two ways, . The first principle arises from us being conscious entities. The very nature of consciousness is that it has an intentional object, meaning that consciousness must always be a consciousness of something, something other than its immediate self. The identity of consciousness is translucently "wrapped around" and completely dependent on the existence of something other than itself. Its being is determined by something beyond itself, transcending itself, the posited object. It is what Sartre calls a "being-for-itself."
The next principle arises from humans not only being conscious entities, but also free conscious entities. We have the power of choice. Because of this power of choice, whatever we are now, we can choose to no longer be such in the future. Or, in other words, as we contemplate our future and our future identity, we realize that because of our freedom, we are not bound in the future to be any one particular way or thing. We have the power to choose out of all the possibilities before us. Thus, being a free being, we are our possibilities.
It is primarily through each of the second described aspects of man’s facticity and transcendence that the possibility of bad faith arises. The switching, the equivocating between one’s present (and past) facticity and one’s transcendence is the first condition that allows bad faith to arise. What bad faith must do is "affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity" (98). Bad faith will insist that certain facticities are transcendences and that certain transcendences are facticities. This condition in action will be depicted later.
The other crucial condition that allows bad faith to arise is the nature of faith. Faith is belief. Sartre describes belief as "the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly" (112). In other words, belief is belief in some idea or view of which one is uncertain is true. In the very act of believing, there is room for doubt, for non-belief. When one only believes, when one does not have certain knowledge, then one is only persuaded "enough" by the evidence to believe. Implicit in belief however is that one still does not completely believe. There is always some doubt or non-belief "left over."
This simultaneous occurrence of belief and non-belief necessarily gives rise to a strange principle of self-destruction. Since to believe is not to believe completely, in the very act of being aware that one believes, one is also aware of one’s nonbelief to whatever extent is the doubt. When one realizes, either in reflection or in spontaneous pre-reflective self-consciousness, that one believes in something, there is concurrently a knowledge of doubt or non-belief. This is because the very nature of belief entails not being fully convinced. Therefore, "To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe" (114).
The beginning then of the bad faith project is to exploit this teetering nature of belief with regard to the evidence for beliefs. The evidence becomes, to a consciousness in bad faith, "non-persuasive evidence." A person in bad faith is not ignorant of the evidence that could lead to the conclusion which the consciousness does not want to conclude. Rather, when a person is in bad faith, there is an initial decision that, whatever the evidence may be, the person will not believe in the troubling undesirable conclusion the evidence entails. After all, the person thinks on some level, in the very act of believing there is always also the left-over non-belief. A person in bad faith in effect can decide beforehand to "favor" the non-convinced side of belief inherent in belief. Conversely, bad faith can be satisfied with little evidence for a conclusion it wants to conclude as well, since as long as there is some evidence, the person may "verily" believe in whatever conclusion that evidence might entail.. It’s true that the person in bad faith does not believe in the conclusion completely --but s/he does not have to, due to the very nature of belief --its simultaneous non-belief. Bad faith can be satisfied with what it believes and not "break any rules."
To recap and consolidate, bad faith is possible for two reasons. One, man is both at once a facticity and a transcendence, a fact that bad faith can and does manipulate. Two, bad faith is faith, belief. And belief always entails a degree of non-belief that bad faith can also exploit to whichever side it wants to favor. These two conditions can and often do work together to allow for bad faith in many combinations.
I think Sartre’s clearest example of this dance of bad faith is the denial of cowardice and the insistence of courageousness. The person does in a sense believe he is a coward, probably because the person has a past of cowardly acts or at least knows of an inclination to flee, frightened, from a dangerous situation. But the person considers this evidence as non-persuasive, because it really is not fully persuasive. His belief in his cowardice is just that, a belief, and belief entails lack of full conviction, a component of non-belief. The non-belief’s evidence is extracted from the transcendent nature of consciousness as a free being, as its possibilities. Though it is true, bad faith acknowledges, that this consciousness has a history of cowardice and perhaps even now an inclination to cowardice, nonetheless this consciousness is free in every moment to choose differently. It can look at its own immediate desire to be courageous as a real inclination to courage that can be fulfilled in the future, and it can believe in its courage now. The coward is in effect tying down his transcendence into a facticity when he believes "I am courageous" as a present truth when he really derived it from his possibilities. And the coward can believe in that courage while doubting it at the same time because, after all, belief always entails a portion of non-belief. It is just a matter of which side bad faith will arbitrarily favor.
Let us return to and examine more closely the behavior of the coquette. How is she abusing her facticity and transcendence, and the nature of belief? In the beginning, before the man takes her hand, she officially denies, in her behavior and more superficial play-acting level of thinking, the underlying sexual meaning of her companion’s words. She strips the words of the transcendent possibilities of the immediate future that they connote. But as she absorbs herself in that superficial facticity, she is still aware of the transcendent meaning of her companion’s words, because, after all, she can believe in the immediate factitious situation and entertain and enjoy the possibility that the situation has a deeper meaning of a future possibility. She can aim her beliefs in such a way as to enjoy the transcendent while only acknowledging in her behavior the factitious, because, in terms of belief, both the factitious and the transcendent have "convincing enough" evidence each way. She manipulates the facticity and transcendence of the situation through the tentative nature of belief.
In her reactions after her hand is taken, she exploits the evidence of each pair of her transcendences to deny her pair of facticities, as outlined earlier. The first factual truth of the situation is that she is a body. She deliberately and passively leaves her hand. She knows that she is her body in both her profound sense of its presence in light of the nature of her companion’s advances, and in the effort to keep her hand artificially still. Yet she simultaneously insists on her transcendence away from this engagement. She is after all essentially a conscious being, a being-for-itself. Since her body is a posited object, in that respect she is not her body. She looks at the evidence of both sides, and seeing the evidence as not fully convincing either way, she believes in both. She is able to believe in both because belief always entails a dose of non-belief. She believes on a more secret level the facticity of her body and thus enjoys her companion’s desire, but officially in her behavior and in the more superficial play-acting of her mind she believes in the essentially transcendent nature of herself.
The second facticity is that she chooses to flirt with this man, or at least allows him to make his advances, and she enjoys it too. Yet as she knows this more secretly, she insists more outwardly that she is really engaging in an intellectual conversation. Not only does she leave her hand inert, but she directs her mind to sentimental speculation. Initially she can ponder that, as one of her transcendent possibilities as a free conscious being, she can have an intellectual conversation with the man. She then slips from this transcendence by playing it out in her speech and behavior. As she speaks of lofty speculative subjects, she makes it partially factitious that she is really having a respectable intellectual conversation. She both simultaneously knows of the deeper sexual implications of the man and her subtle consent and pleasure of it, but can convince herself, --not completely convince herself, nor must she because of the nature of belief-- that, according to the evidence of her transcendent nature as not-body and possibility, and of her "gluing down" her possibility into a warped facticity by her speaking, she is really having just an intellectual conversation. Her favoring the transcendent side, and her attempt to make it factitious by her speech and behavior, yet all the while enjoying the deeper and genuine factitious reality of the man’s advances --this is her bad faith.
Now we have an understanding of what the two conditions of bad faith are --the
facticity-transcendence play made by the mind, and the tentative nature of faith itself--
and how the two conditions can be applied in multiple ways in multiple situations. Sartre
took on an extremely intricate and puzzling phenomena of consciousness and put forth an
interesting theory and solution.
Citation
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Pocket Books, 1956. All
further references to this book will indicate page number(s).
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