Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom

Evidence

As a human being, he is a free ‘for-itself’ like me, but he moves as though he were a beautifully designed mechanism, enacting a predefined role or game. What game is he playing? ‘We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.’ He does this as efficiently as the thief in G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story ‘The Queer Feet’, who slips by unnoticed in a gentleman’s club by moving like a waiter when the club members are around, and like a club member when the waiters are around. A waiter playing a waiter performs his actions so gracefully that the effect is like the sequence of musical notes in Nausea’s ragtime song: it seems absolutely necessary. He tries to be a work of art called Waiter, whereas in truth, like the rest of us, he is a free, fallible, contingent human being. In thus denying his freedom, he enters what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’. There is nothing exceptional about this: most of us are in bad faith most of the time, because that way life is liveable. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505

Categorization

• DEFINE: The canonical definition of Sartre’s bad faith via the waiter — the essential existentialism concept rendered concretely.
• SEED: The Chesterton thief who passes by moving like a waiter among members and a member among waiters is a vivid essay seed about identity as performance and code-switching.
• XREF: Connects to Judith Butler’s performativity and Goffman’s presentation of self, and to the reader’s interest in identity-as-role. — connects to: Psychological guilt stems from evading one’s absolute freedom through bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 71; 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 (+16 more)
• SHARE: Send the Chesterton ‘Queer Feet’ comparison to anyone who enjoys crime fiction or identity/performance themes.
• FICTION: The waiter-as-work-of-art image (‘a work of art called Waiter’) is a fertile fiction image — a character who treats their own role as a crafted artifact.

Broader Connections

• Bad faith arises because humans as negativity face anguish before their freedom #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 31
• Bad faith mistakes a made condition of inferiority for a fixed essence #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 59