Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics

Evidence

Beauvoir tells us that her Ethics of Ambiguity fulfi lls Sartre’s promise. Th is is not, however, the whole story; for though she, like Sartre, makes it clear that the serious man’s refusal of freedom is a bad faith individual failure, she does not take up Sartre’s directive to investigate this failure through the lens of existential psychoanalysis. For Beauvoir, this bad faith betrayal of freedom cannot be adequately dealt with at the individual level. Its political and collective eff ects demand our attention. Th e bad faith of the serious man wears a Nazi uniform. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core question — Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity diverges from Sartre’s own stated program, making authorship/influence direction concrete. — connects to: Beauvoir later disavowed her own ethics of ambiguity for Marxist reasons — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 720; Beauvoir saw women’s condition as bad faith lived all day long — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 682; Beauvoir’s phenomenology held that perception itself diverges across political positions — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 784 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Her refusal of existential psychoanalysis is a substantive break — worth chasing whether this reflects a genuine philosophical disagreement or simply a different project.