Bad faith takes past motives as fixed things immune to present meaning

Evidence

Human reality may be defined as a being such that in its being its freedom is at stake because human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom. Psychologically in each one of us this amounts to trying to take the causes and motives as things. We try to confer permanence upon them. We attempt to hide from ouselves that their nature and their weight depend each moment on the meaning which I give to them; we take them for constants. This amounts to considering the meaning which I gave to them just now or yesterday—which is irremediable because it is past—and extrapolating from it a character fixed still in the present. I attempt to persuade myself that the cause is as it was. Thus it would pass whole and untouched from my past consciousness to my present consciousness. It would inhabit my consciousness. This amounts to trying to give an essence to the for-itself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1076

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates Beauvoir’s reading of bad faith and the temptation to treat one’s past as destiny; the extrapolation of a fixed character from the past foreshadows the themes of The Namesake (Lahiri) about inherited versus chosen identity. — connects to: Bad faith exploits transcendence to evade reproach by affirming it as a thing. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 294; Bad faith operates by restricting another’s conduct to the present and refusing temporal meaning — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 291; Past motives become objective things, collapsing the distinction between cause and motive — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1092 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Bad faith mistakes a made condition of inferiority for a fixed essence #exemplifies (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 59
• Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom #exemplifies (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505
• Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom #qualifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 507