Bad faith exploits transcendence to evade reproach by affirming it as a thing.
Evidence
We can see the use which bad faith can make of these judgments which all aim at establishing that I am not what I am. If I were only what I am, I could, for example, seriously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of me, question myself scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled to recognize the truth in it. But thanks to transcendence, I am not subject to all that I am. I do not even have to discuss the justice of the reproach. As Suzanne says to Figaro, “To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can be wrong.” I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me since what I really am is my transcendence. I flee from myself, I escape myself, I leave my tattered garment in the hands of the fault-finder. But the ambiguity necessary for bad faith comes from the fact that I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of being of a thing. It is only thus, in fact, that I can feel that I escape all reproaches. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 294
Categorization
- XREF: This is the core of Sartre’s bad-faith machinery that Beauvoir’s ethics directly responds to; connects to the reader’s stated purpose of setting up Beauvoir. — connects to: Bad faith flees anguish by relocating freedom into a fixed essence of the self — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 257; Bad faith works by forming concepts that fuse facticity and transcendence without synthesizing them — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 292; Bad faith takes past motives as fixed things immune to present meaning — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1076 (+2 more)
- DEFINE: Precisely defines how bad faith converts the double structure of transcendence/facticity into a tool for self-evasion.
Broader Connections
- Bad faith takes past motives as fixed things immune to present meaning
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1076 - Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom
#expands(0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505