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🪵 The Threshold

The will's bad faith does not oppose but expresses the fundamental project

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@de_beauvoir_ethics_1947, loc. 23, @sartre_being_1943, loc. 313, @sartre_being_1943, loc. 291

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The will’s bad faith does not oppose but expresses the fundamental project

Evidence

But one can choose not to will himself free. In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a vain living palpitation, its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself is an absence. To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively. … It is through this end that it sets up that my spontaneity confirms itself by reflecting upon itself. Then, by a single movement, my will, establishing the content of the act, is legitimized by it. I realize my escape toward the other as a freedom when, assuming the presence of the object, I thereby assume myself before it as a presence. But this justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded; it founds itself. To avoid the anguish of this permanent choice, one may attempt to flee into the object itself, to engulf one’s own presence in it. In the servitude of the serious, the original spontaneity strives to deny itself. It strives in vain, and meanwhile it then fails to fulfill itself as moral freedom. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 23 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach;” that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behavior to what is in the present; she does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the speaker, the immediate meanings, which she imagines as objective qualities. The man who is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square, as the wall coloring is blue or gray. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 291 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The project of bad faith must itself be in bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 316; The will can reshape details but never its originating fundamental project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1138; Bad faith is a form of belief, not a lie or certainty — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 315 (+8 more)

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