Bad faith lets spontaneous projects remain unfounded flights from freedom

Evidence

But one can choose not to will himself free. In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a vain living palpitation, its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself is an absence. To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively. … It is through this end that it sets up that my spontaneity confirms itself by reflecting upon itself. Then, by a single movement, my will, establishing the content of the act, is legitimized by it. I realize my escape toward the other as a freedom when, assuming the presence of the object, I thereby assume myself before it as a presence. But this justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded; it founds itself. To avoid the anguish of this permanent choice, one may attempt to flee into the object itself, to engulf one’s own presence in it. In the servitude of the serious, the original spontaneity strives to deny itself. It strives in vain, and meanwhile it then fails to fulfill itself as moral freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 23

Categorization

• XREF: Beauvoir here names the ‘servitude of the serious’ — the first bad-faith type in the reader’s typology. This passage shows the mechanism: fleeing into the object to escape the anguish of permanent choice, which is precisely what the serious man will do. — connects to: Finitude is the necessary condition of the For-itself’s original project; The will’s bad faith does not oppose but expresses the fundamental project; Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 507 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism of bad faith before the typology is built: spontaneity that is not assumed positively remains a flight, an absence; freedom requires assuming the project.