Consciousness’s translucency makes bad faith a metastable, evanescent structure

Evidence

To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total translucency of consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith since the being of consciousness is consciousness of being. It appears then that I must be in good faith, at least to the extent that I am conscious of my bad faith. But then this whole psychic system is annihilated. We must agree in fact that if I deliberately and cynically attempt to lie to myself, I fail completely in this undertaking; the lie falls back and collapses beneath my look; it is ruined from behind by the very consciousness of lying to myself which pitilessly constitutes itself well within my project as its very condition. … Even though the existence of bad faith is very precarious, and though it belongs to the kind of psychic structures which we might call “metastable,” it presents nonetheless an autonomous and durable form. It can even be the normal aspect of life for a very great number of people. A person can live in bad faith, which does not mean that he does not have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to good faith, but which implies a constant and particular style of life. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 281

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the crucial concept of bad faith as ‘metastable’ — an evanescent, precarious but durable structure that vacillates between good faith and cynicism, yet can be a normal lifelong style.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that one must be conscious of one’s bad faith (since consciousness is translucent) yet this consciousness annihilates the deception — and still bad faith endures as metastable — is a genuinely dense, hard-to-summarize knot at the center of Sartre’s system.
• XREF: connects to: Bad faith unifies being and nothingness in a single consciousness; Bad faith collapses the deceiver and deceived into one consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 280; Bad faith and good faith are both flights conditioned by consciousness’s inner self-disintegration — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 320 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Bad faith and good faith are both flights conditioned by consciousness’s inner self-disintegration #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 320
• Bad faith exploits belief’s inherent self-undoing to install impossible beliefs #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 319
• Consciousness is contradictory and common sense is not unified #corroborates (0.75)
• Consciousness’s transcendence is haunted by love, understanding, and dissolved truths #qualifies (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 18
• Existing consciousness cannot veto insights that expose its own self-contradiction #corroborates (0.72)