Author's Note: In retrospect, this is rather impressionistic :)

 

Prompt 1       Sartre notes: “We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (The Philosophy of Jean- Paul Sartre,p. 150)  Explain this quote, and discuss what Sartre means by  bad faith. Critically evaluate Sartre’s theory of bad faith

Human reality has to hold together both the structures of being and non-being as two parts of the same experiential whole. Sartre’s notion of radical freedom describes the nature of a consciousness that nhilates itself into nothingness as it slips into the past. It is what it is not in that it is void of any substance, any definitive identity we’ve extrapolated from past experiences. While consciousness is grounded in the facticities of its own freedom and the circumstances it faces in the world, it remains more than its body and its function in an environment (Al-Saji 352).  It is not what it is, in that consciousness undergoes a perpetual state of self-actualization that continuously transcends itself into the world. Consciousness for Sartre is to “fly out into the world” (Sartre 5). It is the motion of a being through time given that it remains conscious of something in the space outside itself. This notion of Husserlian intentionality rests on the maxim that “all consciousness is consciousness of something”. Consciousness is indivisible yet notably distinct from the world it is relatively conscious of (4). In one sense, it creates a potentialized meaning for the time and place it finds itself in, projects it onto its horizon, and experiences that meaning fall back on itself. In another sense even our internal lives are displaced into the outer world as consciousness becomes void of substance (5). In that respect, “consciousness is purified” (4) and fluid as it transcends the medium of the Self into World and back into the Self, from “naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa” (Sartre 149). 

In a peculiar line of reasoning, this expungement of all that we are into the outer world unifies the Self with the World, and suggests that the nothingness of consciousness also carries the implication of everythingness. When we strip consciousness from substance and nhilate it into nothingness, “everything is finally outside...even ourselves” (Sarte 5). When we displace our identities onto the event horizon of our own relative experience of the future, a question and condition for everythingness begins to form. Do we share the same temporal horizon as other time-experiencing beings? If we don’t then we must be willing to challenge the notion of a shared human experience and collective forms of cultural identity under Sartre’s model of meaning making, as well as the very notion of consciousness as nothingness. The nhilating structure of consciousness moves the operation of our internal lives into a shared metaphysical space with the outer world it is inextricably bound to. A personal and localized temporal horizon suggests a private plane of existence that can move in a different direction than the natural flow of time, and that would require consciousness to hold a structure of being in-itself. If we do share a uniform temporal field with the metaphysical environment we collectively displace ourselves into, then the no-thingness and unity with everythingness of consciousness become conditional upon each other. It is what it is not, and while it seems like it breaks down the metaphysical division between one person and another, or one person and their environment, consciousness remains physically distinct from the tree it observes or the person it falls into. 

While this notion that all conscious beings are caught up by the same stream of time might imply temporal unity between conscious beings, it does not imply spatial unity between “a thing among things” (5). On one hand, Sartre accentuates that the transcendence of consciousness is not limitless, it cannot traverse the sea of this unified temporal field like a person can sail the Atlantic, but rather we must acknowledge “facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being factiticity” (Sartre 148). While seemingly and potentially limitless, consciousness is nevertheless grounded in a body that needs rest, an inescapable freedom of being, and a world that refuses to move without being acted upon. On the other hand, while spatial unity is captured by the causal entanglement of all living beings, consciousness is not bound to be reactionary to the expectations of a social environment. In fact, as Al-Saji argues, the identity imposed by my being for others, the social expectations of who I ought to be, are not wholly authoritative given that my identity originates and is constituted by my being for myself (355). Any such attempt at deviating from this natural form of consciousness as being for itself, as opposed to the objectified modality of being-in-itself, is what Sartre calls bad faith. 

Bad faith for Sartre is a lived project of denying and hiding the denial of our true natures of consciousness behind the illusion of duality without acknowledging the unity of the whole. This modality of consciousness is an attempt to flee either the radical freedom of nhilating consciousness or the responsibility of continuously becoming through the meaning we ascribe to the world. This mode of being is considered “meta-stable” in that one’s disillusionment to the nature of consciousness is artificially preserved like a spider's nest bound to be blown away by Sartre’s strong wind of consciousness (140). This lie we pose to ourselves is a pre-reflective process given that our awareness of the lie at the reflective stage of awareness dissipates the authority of the lie. In order to hide a lie from oneself, one must first be pre-reflectively aware of what it is trying to hide from the reflective mind. As a result of the dissonance between the pre-reflective belief in the object of consciousness and the unaware reflective mind, bad faith creates the illusion of a tense duality where unity of consciousness ought to be held (139). Unobstructed awareness thus becomes the blanket that unifies both the pre-reflective and reflective planes of consciousness, where translucency becomes a form of accessibility. This attempt to utilize the natural freedom of consciousness to escape that very freedom objectifies consciousness into a being in-itself as opposed to a being for itself. 

Bad faith is the attempt to escape being itself by diminishing itself into being in-itself. Being in-itself is an ontological description of physical objects that are bound to the principle of identity and non-contradiction. Objects such as telescopes cannot be and not be in the same way that consciousness is and is not what it is. My telescope is one and the same as my telescope, it cannot occupy the same space and time as a different telescope. A being for itself however, both is and is not. Shrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead, existant in a state of non-existence, just as consciousness is both nothingness and the perpetual attempt at breaking from nothingness. While the “I” of consciousness is nothing, and by extension everything, “I” seems to stubbornly resist this predicament. I tries to create an identity for itself despite the futility of any efforts at constituting a definitive and static identity. I is a being for itself, with the choice to define itself however it likes, but is nevertheless bound by the principles of intersubjectivity and its being for others. Being for itself is a feature of consciousness that allows it to continuously transcend itself. It requires a being to experience and be aware of the passage of time. To be for itself invites the notion that consciousness is more than just the function or form of the being thing, instead it is a dynamic state of motion outwards into the world. 

An important critique of Sartre’s account of bad faith is that it neglects the impact of social bad faith on an individual’s capacity to avail themselves to their own freedom. In being in the world, consciousness attempts to project for itself a future and actualize a dynamic identity. This motion of consciousness is met by the wavefront of being in the midst of the world. In self-nhilating, consciousness spills the process of meaning making into a basin of societal expectations on the meaning we ought to be making for ourselves. Sartre captures this dynamic by arguing that a soldier that dreams offends their superiors because the societal interest rests in imprisoning the individual in the role and responsibility of being a soldier. This attempt at objectifying the soldiers’ consciousness is an attempt of their social environment at imposing a notion of bad faith on the soldier. Instead of having the choice of being for themselves, the soldier is actively being diminished into the modality of a being-in-itself, the role of soldier and nothing more. When the expectations of society are commandeered by colonial forces actively structuring society to benefit white faces and objectify minorities into roles of submission, it can be easy to see how Sartre underestimates the role of social bad faith. Sartre’s phenomenological methodology aims to explain consciousness from the inside out. Tracking the mechanisms of consciousness by investigating his own experience of what is most reductively human. This project aims to generalize the experience of consciousness as being universal between humans. Otherwise its just Sartre and his say haha. In turn Sartre aims at describing the nothingness and freedom of consciousness as being universally accessible. This, on the other hand, comes at the expense of the truth of our socialized realities. The truth being that different members of society struggle differently, under different degrees of strain, against different numbers of obstacles, when attempting to dissipate bad faith and realize the purity of consciousness. 

 

Citations:
Al-Saji , Alia. “Sartrean Freedom and Bad Faith: Social Identities and Situations.” Introducing Philosophy for Canadians , 2011, pp. 352–356.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: Selections. Citadel Press, 1964.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserls Phenomenology.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 1, no. 2, 1970, pp. 4–5., https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118.

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