Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom

Evidence

For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list. Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself. We cannot say (to quote more examples from Sartre’s 1945 lecture) ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.’ We do say such things, all the time; but we are in bad faith when we do it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 507

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clear definition of bad faith/good faith with concrete examples from Sartre’s own 1945 lecture.
• XREF: Pairs with the existentialism reading project; this is the core account of bad faith used in Everyman/contrast discussions. — 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 emerges when one acknowledges facts but refuses their imposed conclusion. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 307 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom #corroborates (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505
• Bad faith lets spontaneous projects remain unfounded flights from freedom #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 23