Bad faith requires the for-itself to both be and not be what it is
Evidence
Bad faith is possible only because sincerity is conscious of missing its goal inevitably, due to its very nature. I can try to apprehend myself as “not being cowardly,” when I am so, only on condition that the “being cowardly” is itself “in question” at the very moment when it exists, on condition that it is itself one question, that at the very moment when I wish to apprehend it, it escapes me on all sides and annihilates itself. The condition under which I can attempt an effort in bad faith is that in one sense, I am not this coward which I do not wish to be. But if I were not cowardly in the simple mode of not-being-what-one-is-not, I would be “in good faith” by declaring that I am not cowardly. Thus this inapprehensible coward is evanescent; in order for me not to be cowardly, I must in some way also be cowardly. That does not mean that I must be “a little” cowardly, in the sense that “a little” signifies “to a certain degree cowardly—and not cowardly to a certain degree.” No. I must at once both be and not be totally and in all respects a coward. Thus in this case bad faith requires that I should not be what I am; that is, that there be an imponderable difference separating being from non-being in the mode of being of human reality. … Thus in order for bad faith to be possible, sincerity itself must be in bad faith. The condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in the infrastructure of the pre-reflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 313
Categorization
- DEFINE: Lays out the precise ontological condition of bad faith: an imponderable difference between being and non-being internal to human reality.
- XREF: This is the core machinery Beauvoir inherits — bad faith as flight from the ambiguity of freedom. Read against The Ethics of Ambiguity. — connects to: Bad faith is the contradiction of asserting both freedom and its absence at once — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 77; 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 requires a self-decentering power that nihilates anguish while being it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 260 (+10 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The ‘both be and not be totally and in all respects’ formulation is the paradox at the heart of Sartre’s ontology of the for-itself; it resists any one-sentence gloss and repays long sitting.
Broader Connections
- Bad faith requires a being that is not what it is, unlike inert objects
#expands(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 312 - Bad faith also positively constitutes the self as what it is not
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 314 - The project of bad faith must itself be in bad faith
#expands(0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 316 - Bad faith’s possibility constrains what kind of being man must be.
#expands(0.75)