Psychological guilt stems from evading one’s absolute freedom through bad faith

Evidence

Psychological guilt, by which I mean consciousness of doing the kind of wrong which can be avoided and for which one is thus personally responsible, Sartre finds in the conduct of bad faith. It consists in not accepting one’s responsibilities as a For-itself, in seeking to blame someone or something for what one has done freely oneself, in choosing to assert one’s freedom only where it is expedient and on other occasions to seek refuge in a theory of psychological determinism. It is to pretend that one is born with a determined self instead of recognizing that one spends one’s life pursuing and making oneself. It is the refusal to face the anguish which accompanies the recognition of our absolute freedom. Thus guilt is a lack of authenticity, which comes close to being the one new and absolute virtue in existentialism. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 71

Categorization

• DEFINE: The distinction between psychological and existential guilt is a key conceptual framing — guilt as a lack of authenticity, resolvable by embracing freedom.
• XREF: Bad faith as flight from anguish connects directly to the freedom-facticity tension that grounds Beauvoir’s ethics. — connects to: Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 505; Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 507; Bad faith arises because humans as negativity face anguish before their freedom — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 31 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Bad faith involves performing a fixed role to deny one’s underlying freedom #corroborates (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 505
• Bad faith flees anguish by relocating freedom into a fixed essence of the self #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 257
• Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom #corroborates (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 507
• Bad faith arises because humans as negativity face anguish before their freedom #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 31
• Bad faith is the contradiction of asserting both freedom and its absence at once #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 77
• Bad faith requires a self-decentering power that nihilates anguish while being it #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260
• Bad faith collapses the deceiver and deceived into one consciousness #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 280
• Bad faith links fear of freedom to anti-Semitic demonization of others #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 506
• Bad faith also positively constitutes the self as what it is not #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 314
• The supposed intuition of freedom is a constructed evasion of anguish #expands (0.80)
• Bad faith exploits belief’s inherent self-undoing to install impossible beliefs #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 319
• Anxiety about freedom drives subjects to alienate themselves in things #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 128
• Projecting badness onto others protects the self from internal contradiction. #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 646