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 are instrumental towards a teleological aim or a multitude of teleological aims) and identifications of personal identities -as, Sartre sees the “self” as a multifaceted notion (i.e. an individual has a multiplicity of selves, which constitutes the various roles we take up in life). For instance, my current Being-for-itself is sitting down editing this paper as a student. Our capacity for negation allows us to comprehend and navigate the Being-In-Itself of the world, insofar Being-In-Itself has a fullness of being (full positivity), which without our capacity for negation would overwhelm us ad nauseam as the sheer totality of things. Not just of things, but also of selves: as stated earlier, I am a student editing his paper; if I was simultaneously all of the other roles (Being-In-Itself) that I play in my daily life, that would overwhelm me to the point of an inability to be and become. The basis of negation is freedom, which is the essence of humans insofar as they are…