Sartre and bad faith

Sartre and Bad Faith

In his book, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre explains concepts that relate to his ideas on life and death. The idea of "bad faith" is then also seen in the light of these states, life relating to "Being" in the title, and death to "Nothingness." Sartre therefore approaches the states of life and death from a purely physical and philosophical viewpoint, rather than that of religion. Everything occurs in the human mind, or consciousness. Indeed, the philosopher groups religion with self-destructive substances such as alcohol and drugs as a method to perpetuate bad faith. Bad faith is then also not regarded in terms of inter-human relationships, but rather as a personal relationship of each individual with the self. For Sartre, bad faith means that human beings tend to deceive themselves, especially where death, or nothingness, is concerned.

Sartre notes that the human fear of non-being culminates in a feeling of anguish. This does not however only include the fear that results from the idea that the future may hold non-existence. It is also the anguish that results from the human ability to choose. Sartre is in agreement with Kierkegaard and Hiedegegger, in that choice and nothingness are closely related. Indeed, these concepts are bound together by the human anguish that they cause. According to Sartre, the Self recognizes not only the possibility of future non-existence, but only the current possibility of choice. The problem is that such choice is not clear in terms of validity or values.

According to Sartre, the human being is unable to determine whether his or her choices are in fact good ones, or whether they are indeed valid in the face of future nothingness. There simply are no guarantees, and often only time and its consequences reveal the wisdom of any given choice at any given time. This creates further anguish.

Historically in any human life, certain choices have led to unforeseen disasters or at least unfavorable consequences. These then contribute to the question of freedom of choice. In this way, Sartre does not see human free will as a blessing, but rather as a burden. Some find this burden much too heavy to bear, and take refuge in certain devices of self-deception. These are what Sartre refers to as bad faith.

When seen in literal terms, Sartre takes bad faith to mean that human beings deceive themselves by putting faith in false phenomena in order to escape reality. Faced with the responsibility of making choices, those engaging in bad faith activities choose to relinquish their freedom to a substance or philosophy that will take this responsibility away. Religion serves as a good example to explain this concept.

Religion is reassuring on both the levels of choice and nothingness. Religion provides human beings with a system in which choices are made for them. According to Christianity, for example, the choice to follow Christ and his teachings leads to eternal life - continued being instead of nothingness. Anguish is therefore relieved on two levels. On the level of choice, religion leads by means of ritual and behavior. Human beings are required to behave in a certain manner in order to belong to a certain religion. There is no possibility of debate regarding the issue. And this provides relief.

On the second level, relief is provided in terms of continued being, as mentioned. The result of the choiceless lifestyle is continued life. Instead of true faith in the religious system, Sartre claims that the individual clings to religion to relieve anguish. This does not however mean that the person truly believes in the claims made by the religion. Instead, it simply serves as a system to distract the consciousness not only from the responsibility of choice, but also from the knowledge of past and future nothingness. This is self-deception, according to Sartre. This is bad faith.

According to Sartre, some have managed to deceive themselves so well that they have begun to in fact believe their own lies. However, the consciousness remains in contact with the real truth to some degree. Sartre believes that human beings willingly deceive themselves, even while being fully aware of the true state of affairs regarding life and death. Human beings are however particularly susceptible to this brand of self-deception precisely because of their anguish in terms of choice and nothingness. People who use religion or other substances to escape this anguish engage in bad faith - they are unable to find within themselves a faith that is strong enough in itself to overcome such anguish. Instead, they choose the path of self-deception, engaging in a bad-faith relationship with religion or more earthly substances such as alcohol.

In contrast to religion, Sartre calls for personal responsibility in using the human faculty of free thought to make choices. In general, however, people prefer their convenient lies, because this means that there may not be annihilation at the end of life, or indeed that there was no such non-being before the beginning of the individual's physical existence. In essence, bad faith constitutes lying to oneself (Brown).

Brown notes that Sartre considered two factors to be included in this act of willful lying. The first is that only one person is involved in the act of deceit. The individual is fully aware of the truth behind the lie, but prefers to profess to the self an ideal in the form of an untruth. In such lying, the person who lies and the one to whom the lie is told are the same person. This entails a type of paradox: as the deceiver, the individual knows the truth behind the lie, while as the recipient of the lie, the truth is also hidden from the self receiving the lie.

This however creates a paradox that Sartre attempts to solve: how can the liar and the person receiving the lie be the same without a breakdown in the belief process? Indeed, how is bad faith possible? According to Brown, Sartre did not believe that the Freudian attempt to solve this problem was either accurate or sufficient to address the complexity of the problem. According to this philosophy, the human consciousness functions upon the bases of three levels, the id, the superego and the ego. The first is the unconsciousness, the second normative functions, and the third the reflecting consciousness that balances the three parts of the consciousness as a whole. For Sartre, bad faith cannot occur within any of these parts without at least some level of knowledge by the individual. In self-deception, some level of the individual must be aware of this. He therefore rejects the Freudian claim that part of the subconscious is entirely unaware of the truth, which enables the individual to perpetuate the lie.

In this Sartre searches for a different explanation for bad faith. The philosopher uses the notion of alienation to explain this. Society is constructed in such a way that the individual is compelled to fulfill certain roles. Many of these roles are not closely connected to the desires of the individual or the requirements of his or her happiness. In order to adequately fulfill these roles then, the individual is required to "act" in certain capacities and roles in the world, as this is what the world requires. The individual is bound by elements such as the need to acquire a means of living, the need for social status, or for a certain regard in the eyes of his or her family. Just making a living in society can therefore in itself be seen as an act of self-deception. The individual increasingly becomes alienated from his or her desires and the freedom to pursue these. This alienation then creates a platform for further self-deception and bad faith, by means of which the responsibility of choice is relinquished.

According to Brown, Sartre does not believe that even sincerity is a cure for this. The problem once again lies in the relationships and paradigms imposed by society. The individual who believes him- or herself sincere is most likely only so to the extent that society expects it. An element of bad faith remains. To be "sincerely" religious, for example, means only that bad faith has penetrated so deeply that the individual's deceived self has become so isolated from the deceiving self that he or she is beginning to believe the lie.

For Sartre, the human tendency to categorize human being into groups is one of the great culprits in bad faith. A person is placed into a category of work, religion, orientation, class, and so on. Such classification discourages freedom and choice. Indeed, social values hold that a certain level of class, faith and so on can be imposed upon individuals, and that such individuals have little choice in the matter or indeed the capacity to change or transcend the boundaries of their groupings. The notion is so strongly ingrained in the social consciousness that the individual then believes that the boundaries are indeed insurmountable, which leads to the bad faith situation as described by Sartre. The individual believes the lies imposed by society, and sees them for truth. It provides a convenient vehicle for relinquishing the responsibility of freedom. Categories and definitions limit freedom, choice, and the capacity to transcend categorization.

According to Brown, it should also be kept in mind that the bad faith concept is somewhat beyond simple self-deception. It is the perpetuation of a "truth" that the individual knows to be in fact false. However, this perpetuation feeds upon itself by the individual's needs for whatever is the result of the deception. For the unhappy worker, for example, bad faith persists as a result of the paycheck, while the unhappy mother would continue in bad faith for the sake of being called a "good" mother, and so on. In Sartre's view then, it appears that there is little that the individual within such a society can do to escape bad faith. Even in the attempt to escape bad faith, the individual perpetuates it by his or her belief that this is in fact the case. Whatever an individual tells him- or herself regarding the state of bad faith, it is likely to be a lie for the sake of escaping the responsibility and the burden of true freedom.

In this way, society imposes bad faith by imposing artificial categories upon life and living. Individuals are groups according to things such as their income, type of work, religion, marital status, sexual preference, and so on. All these categories are imposed in order to maintain artificial order in society. Individuals tend to submit to these willingly in order to escape the responsibility that would result from complete freedom and choice. Individuals cannot face the burden of making their own choices, and hence happily relinquishes this responsibility to society as a collective whole.

According to Sartre then, there are both individual and collective reasons for bad faith. On the individual level, a person engages in self-deceit mostly as a result of anguish. Such anguish generally relates to the nothingness that the individual fears at the end of being. The individual then looks towards society to assuage this fear. Society supplies comfort in the form of categories and institutions. Institutions such as religion relieves the individual of the fear relating to non-being. Categories such as income level and class relieves the individual of the responsibility of choice. For this relief, the individual pays the price of true sincerity and freedom, and does so happily.

Sartre (48) notes that self-deception is commonly seen as identical to lying in general, but emphasizes that, as seen above, it should be distinguished from lying in general. Lying to the self takes on many more complex notions, because the liar and the victim are the same person, which implies that the victim must to some degree be aware of the lie. The point reiterated here is that the self being lied to allows the deception. He or she is willing and even eager to be deceived for the sake of the comfort level that this entails.

In this regard, Sartre notes that self-deception does not only entail the external world, but also the internal world. Deceiving the self means alienation from the self as well as from the external. According to Sartre (57), this culminates in the statement that "I am not what I am." This means that the individual is influenced not only by the perfectly free and perfectly independent self. Instead, there are many external influences that both adds and detracts from the individual's original self. Hence, what remains is no longer the untouched identity of the free individual. Being bound by the requirements of society, making a living, providing for a family, and the like, fundamentally alters a person.

An individual may for example enjoy playing the piano. However, the same person may have a demanding family life, which keeps him or her away from this favorite pastime. Eventually, piano playing is all but forgotten under the deluge of family obligations and demands such as school work and grocery buying. In this way, the fundamental essence of the individual is changed, and he or she can say that "I am not what I am." This does not however mean that the original person is gone, but rather that the "new" individual overrides the old. The person that is artificially created by his or her environment becomes something different from the original that both loved playing the piano and had the time to do so.

This creates the platform for bad faith in Sartre's terms. Bad faith means not only that the self is attempting to extinguish individual anguish. It also means that the environment is conducive towards this bad faith. The family demands that the person engages in family duties most of the time, despite the fact that he or she enjoys being alone and playing the piano. In order to extinguish the anguish arising from this, the individual subscribes to the belief that he or she loves the obligatory daily family duties above all else. This is knowing self-deception and hence bad faith.

The same occurs in other areas of life, such as the already-mentioned aspects of religion and work. According to Brown, the working individual sees him- or herself not as an individual performing a certain function, but rather as synonymous with the work being done. A waiter for example does not see himself as a person waiting tables, but instead refers to himself as "a waiter." The same is true for other professions, such as lawyer, doctor, writer, etc. The functions define the person rather than the other way around. This is the semantic aspect of bad faith. People engage in duties and functions that define them in different and diverse ways. Each individual's personal and public life is then filled with enjoyable and less enjoyable elements. The tension between these create anxiety and anguish. This tension is then mitigated by bad faith.