Bad faith and good faith are both flights conditioned by consciousness’s inner self-disintegration

Evidence

In bad faith there is no cynical lie nor knowing preparation for deceitful concepts. But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it is. The very project of flight reveals to bad faith an inner disintegration in the heart of being, and it is this disintegration which bad faith wishes to be. In truth, the two immediate attitudes which we can take in the face of our being are conditioned by the very nature of this being and its immediate relation with the in-itself. Good faith seeks to flee the inner disintegration of my being in the direction of the in-itself which it should be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by means of the inner disintegration of my being. But it denies this very disintegration as it denies that it is itself bad faith. Bad faith seeks by means of “not-being-what-one-is” to escape from the in-itself which I am not in the mode of being what one is not. It denies itself as bad faith and aims at the in-itself which I am not in the mode of “not-being-what-one-is-not.” If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. The origin of this risk is the fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 320

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines both good faith and bad faith as twin flight-attitudes rooted in consciousness’s structural self-negation, and locates the permanent risk of bad faith in consciousness’s double nature.
• XREF: This is the core ontological machinery Beauvoir builds on and radicalizes; direct backdrop for the reader’s stated purpose. — connects to: Bad faith unifies being and nothingness in a single consciousness; Consciousness’s translucency makes bad faith a metastable, evanescent structure — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 281; Authenticity is the radical self-recovery that escapes the good-bad faith dichotomy (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Bad faith is a permanent risk rooted in consciousness’s double nature. #expands (0.84) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 411
• Bad faith also positively constitutes the self as what it is not #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 314
• Bad faith is the contradiction of asserting both freedom and its absence at once #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 77
• Bad faith exploits belief’s inherent self-undoing to install impossible beliefs #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 319
• Bad faith arises because humans as negativity face anguish before their freedom #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 31
• Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom #expands (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505