Sartre: Bad Faith and its Incompatibility with Human Freedom

Lying is part of our everyday being. Too often we take for granted how much unnecessary suffering it causes us. “To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.” What is common to lying is that there is a deceiver who is doing the lying and the deceived who -assuming the lie is believed- believes the lie. However, this dichotomy can be assimilated to a comparable phenomenon that is not oriented by a subject-object dichotomy. Jean-Paul Sartre called this “bad faith”. Sartre’s characterization of bad faith, however, befalls him into a multitude of puzzles. Specifically, in the inescapability of bad faith. In this inescapability, Sartre also claims we have “freedom”, which in terms of philosophical coherence, is irreconcilable, as if we were free, we’d be able to escape from the vicious circle of bad faith.

We as human beings have a capacity for negation -which in Sartre’s essay, The Transcendence of The Ego, is made evident in our capacity to form questions, which imply a potential negative answer. Wherein this capacity for negation exists ontologically is Being-For-Itself. Being-for-itself is illuminated by imminent aims (that is, aims which…