SARTRE PT. II

Admittedly, after reading Bad Faith once through, it sailed right over my head. After giving it a second go, it still sailed over my head, but this time the whoosh was softer and slower. It took a minute, but I eventually got a pretty decent grasp on Bad Faith – I think.

On the surface, lying and 'bad faith' seem pretty similar, but Sartre makes a clear (and necessary) distinction between the two. Sartre suggests that lying is – well, pretty much lying in the traditional sense – knowing the truth but refusing to impart it, and instead presenting some other idea which one knows to be false. Slightly similarly, but mostly conversely, Sartre suggests that bad faith is an attempt to flee the anguish of freedom and responsibility through modes of self-deception, in which we deceive ourselves about ourselves. So in a sense, bad faith involves lying, but lying does not necessarily require bad faith. Embedded within these definitions, are a couple of terms that merit definitions of their own. Sartre explicates freedom as a fundamental potentiality unique to humans; freedom is a fundamental facet of humanism, and as humans, we are always free to respond as we see fit to determining tendencies. As posited by Sartre, we are our choices; we cannot not choose, not choosing is still a choice; when faced with inevitable circumstance, we still choose how we are under those circumstances.

Sartre puts forth a couple examples of bad faith in action, one of which involves a woman and her date. The woman ignores the clearly sexual implications of her date's compliments on her physical appearance, and when he reaches for her hand, she lets it rest indifferently in his – “neither consenting or rejecting – a thing”. In doing so, the woman acts as though her hand exists solely in the in-itself, as nothing more than an object in the world. The woman suspends the inevitable moment of choice by taking advantage of her duality as a human – that of a physical being as well as a conscious being separate from the physicality of the world. As such, the woman is acting in bad faith.

In light of the aforementioned, I think it's safe to say that Sartre was radically and entirely opposed to determinism, and instead, embraced our human ability and responsibility to transform and create ourselves indefinitely. The duality of human existence – that of facticity and transcendence – is akin to a duality proposed by Sartre in First Attitudes Towards Others: Love, Language, Masochism.

In the reading, Sartre proposes the concept of the individual and the other, and discusses the various effects he believes each has on its counterpart. An important question that was brought up during discussion, involves both the individual and the other, and the part (if any) each plays in defining its counterpart. This point was kind of polarizing – does the individual define the other, or does the other define the individual? Maybe this is a copout (bad faith?), but I think either side is true to a certain extent. The latter might be true to greater degree, simply because we spend so much of our lives worrying about what others think of us, and adjusting our actions and behaviors in accordance with societal expectations. I don't thinks this is necessarily a bad thing. I think society tends to encourage behaviors that promote the well-being of our species – although there are certainly exceptions to this assumption. On the other side of the coin, somebody brought up a really great point in saying that others perceptions of us are constructed almost entirely by us. That is, we really can't be positive of what others truly think of us without asking and receiving their honest opinion. And even then, how can you be sure that they are being completely honest?