Bad Faith as Viewed by Jean-Paul Sartre

¶ … Bad Faith" as viewed by Jean-Paul Sartre in "Being and Nothingness" and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In "The Darkness of the Cave."

We will also digress and speculate if Jean-Paul Sartre and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were to engage in a conversation on "bad faith" as to what would each of them argue? We will discuss what their alleged beliefs on bad faith and freedom would entail.

Comparison and Contrast

Jean-Paul Sartre

For Sartre, we are condemned to be free. If we do not realize this, it is an act of "bad faith." For Sartre, when one lives a life is defined by occupation, racial, social, or economic class, this is, bottomline, the very inner essence of "bad faith." Sartre defines this as a condition in which people are able to transcend their life situations so that they can realize what must be and what they are not. For Sartre, it is also critical for a person who exists to understand that a negation of self for a person to reach their proper potential. This is because there is no God for people to plug into. These people proceed from a falsity and have committed bad faith because they have lied to themselves (Sartre, 1969, 47-48).

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in the 1960s that "Most people are totally unaware of the darkness of the cave in which the Negro is forced to live. A few individuals can break out, but the vast majority remains its prisoners. Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst (King, 2010, 224)." This statement sets the tone for his essay. In his opinion, blacks in the ghetto have no access to the American dream that flies over the ghetto and drives on interstate highways that detour the slums. The affluent members of American society do not see what goes on in the ghetto with its suffering and miserable residents.

The residents of the ghettos however are very much aware of their situation. The outside world of America is an exclusive club, and they are not members. Instead, they toil and work at the menial jobs that the people outside the ghetto do not want to do. Even the good paying blue collar jobs are out of their reach because of the dominance of whites in labor unions (ibid.). Certainly, they are not part of the American dream and they would feel that they have been dealt with in bad faith because of this (ibid.).

Modern Reactions

Sartre's argument about existentialism, nothingness and bad faith essentially exists in the mind and intellect. The dichotomy with Sartre's ideas is that the deceiver and the deceived are one and the same person who is engaged in the act of bad faith (Zunjic, 2011). In reaction to Martin Luther King, professor Bilal Dabir Sekou, Ph.D. An Associate Professor of Politics and Government in Hillyer College at the University of Hartford, was looking to understand King and remarks. Sekou says that things are even more so now, meaning that Dr. King's words are more prescient than ever as we are now seeing the culmination of globalization's devastation of America's cities since then (Sekou, 2008). In other words, the ghetto dwellers are not engaged a mental exercise. Their hell is very real and their options are limited with little or no freedom except the few fortunates who made their way out.

Synthesis Attempt