As I mentioned the other day that when I had talked about bad faith previously, I didn’t know what it was, I thought it was somewhat required that I find out.
As with much of what I had to say on the emotions, I have Robert Solomon to thank for this. Recently one could get two Great Courses series for the price of one on Audible and so I got Bob’s series on the existentialists.
Let’s get going. Jean-Paul Sartre is both a Cartesian and a believer in modern science. That means he has to see mind and matter as separate and accept determinism. Both present a problem in his quest for ultimate freedom and complete responsibility. But he manages, through some real ducking, diving and complexity to get to this position in his great work Being and Nothingness.
He has as a launchpad Kant’s claim that ‘insofar as we consider ourselves as agents, we cannot imagine ourselves as anything other than free.’ Although consciousness imposes causal categories on the world, that’s not how we see ourselves. We can separate – in Sartre’s terms, we have to separate – the objective, scientific view of the world from our phenomenological first-person action-oriented experience of it.
When we consider consciousness, as I have recounted before, we cannot ‘find’ consciousness in consciousness – it is not an object of consciousness. It is nothing as far as our first-person awareness is concerned. If it is not a thing, then it is not caused and then, hey presto, it’s free.
In addition, because consciousness is nothing, we cannot, as Descartes feared, be ‘stuck inside it’. For Sartre, consciousness is (confusingly) as well as nothing, action. Well, I guess that makes sense. It is not a ‘thing’, it is ‘being’. It is how the world appears to us based on our desires and expectations. (I guess this demonstrates the influence of Heidegger.)
Sartre accepts that much of what we do is, in his term, ‘pre-reflective’ – we just do it without drawing the reasons or motives into consciousness. But when we do consider objects of consciousness, like reasons or emotions, they do not have a deterministic causal impact – we can choose how we act. Indeed, emotions, in his view are not ‘causes of behaviour’ – they are ‘outpourings of consciousness’ in which we take in the world in a certain way. They are ways of structuring consciousness. Our values, expectations, plans and desires shape what we experience in a certain evaluative way.
To go over what I have already written about in Harmony, consider looking at a cup on the table. We can see part of it, the side facing us. Yet we know it has a back and an underneath that we can’t see. We know it has a certain weight and texture. It we went to pick it up and found any of this missing, we’d be shocked. We don’t ‘see’ these other qualities, but we expect them. In a sense, what we see is always far more than we actually see. And this can involve values as well. That mountain could be a place for recreation, an aesthetic stimulus or an obstacle. Consciousness is active in creating perceptions of the world; they are not just bytes of information passively received.
According to Sartre, we see the world in terms of what we want. That is not just cake but cake-to-be eaten. And this is relevant when we consider absence – as I recounted in Harmony, we immediately recognise the absence of what is desired. In fact, this can be our constant state (it is mine): we see in the world always the lack of what is desired (in my case, of anything that is meaningful).
But we always have the ability to put this lack, or any pain (mental of physical), at a distance: to see it as an object of consciousness, to consider it, and then choose how to respond. Because consciousness is where we have freedom; because these objects of consciousness do not have causal power over us.
Philosophers of the analytic tradition criticise phenomenologists because they say the latter just present their views as truth. Those in the former tradition will take some premises and go through a rigorous, logical argument to reach a conclusion. But the phenomenologists counter that those conclusions can seem entirely alien, abstracted and so far removed from lived experience that, frankly, they seem incredible, meaningless. Sartre wants to found his philosophy on premises that are part of lived experience.
So, when those in the analytic tradition ask how we can be sure, for example, that any other people have consciousness and ask how that could be proved, Sartre wants to say, ‘Just consider the feeling of shame. When you are found out stealing a sweet from the jar and you see someone looking at you, the experience is not “Oh, a pair of eyes” but “A person has seen me”.’ For him, that is enough to contradict any doubts about the existence of others’ consciousness.
This concept is related to his idea of being-for-others, which I’ll get onto another day.
For now, I want to go on to the bad faith bit.
First, though, we need to consider what Sartre means by ‘self’. Whereas many see the self as either analogous with consciousness or as somehow ‘within’ consciousness, that’s not his take. Consciousness may be entirely empty of self. It is the active engagement with living. Think about a person fully focused on painting or on making a risotto. If she examines the contents of consciousness at that time, she will find, ‘The eye is too light. More paint required.’ Or ‘Rice sticking to the pan! Water!’ There is no ‘I’, just action. Engagement with the world. Tasks to be completed.
In contrast, the self is out there in the world. It is an accumulation of all the facts about us; the achievements and failures; the actions and experiences. We, in a way, have to review the tapes of our lives to see our self. It is what we would tell others; it’s how they would describe us. They might describe us more accurately than we describe ourselves. We are what we do.
Here’s where ‘facticity’ comes in. This encompasses all the facts about us – where we were born, who are parents are, that we had such-and-such an education, such-and-such experiences. All the past is fact – we can’t change it. So is the present: I am now on my sofa in Northampton typing. And some aspects of the future are facts – notably that we will die.
That contrasts with the other aspect of the self which he called, confusingly, transcendence. He does not mean outside the world, like God might be or like Kant’s noumenal (as opposed to phenomenal) realm. He means how we ‘over-reach’ the facts about us. So, this encompasses aspirations and desires. That I aspire to be involved professionally in Practical Ethics defines some aspects of me – that I am reading philosophy, that I have set aside money. In a given moment, I may be working toward my desire to be healthier (by running) or my desire to be of social use (in researching for an interview with the co-author of The Inner Level). Our transcendence has a temporal quality, in that it is both full of the past (the fact I applied to do the Masters) and pregnant with the future (my desire to attain the qualification) as well as existing in the future (that I am reading about ethics). To a certain extent, my self is thus dependent on what I am not. My actions may be chosen by what I am not. In this way, our desires and possibilities can be part of who we are.
Notice, and this is related to what I had to say about inner constraints, we can deny our possibilities and close down who we are.
Now, sometimes we try to change our facticity. We might lie about our age, for example. We might refuse to accept the facts about ourselves. But nothing we can do changes facts. The facts about us will limit our transcendence. That I am approaching fifty means that I cannot have the aspiration to be a professional footballer. Yet if I refuse to accept the facts of the matter and claim that, yes, being a professional footballer is my aspiration, then my aspiration is corrupting my facticity – and this would be one style of bad faith. So would the claim that I am not a freelance journalist with the desire to be a philosopher, but that I am, in fact, a philosopher. To exist in a realm of fantasy, abstracts a person from the social world and the failure to pay attention to the facts of the matter is a failure of responsibility.
It would be just as much an example of bad faith, however, to deny all possibility and to claim that all I am is my facticity. The claim that my facticity is my ‘essence’ is to deny responsibility because it sites me in a realm of excuses. So, to say ‘I can’t be a philosopher because I am a journalist’ is bad faith. To say that I have to behave in a certain restricted way because I am a woman, born into a certain social environment at a certain time suggests that I am not taking any responsibility for myself.
Navigating a path between the devil and the deep blue sea is not easy, but that is the realm of responsibility.
Sartre denied he was doing ethics, but the insistence on recognising ‘the facts of the matter’ always pushes the individual into the social domain, while the assertion of the value of possibility likewise forces the individual into a realm of striving. Responsibility for who you are, and accepting that, while constrained by facticity, there are no excuses, when taken together, creates a hardline approach to personal development.
Now, Sartre was inspired, in part, to look at people this way because he was so appalled by the failure of many of his fellow countrymen and women to fight against Nazi occupation. People always had excuses: I am afraid (Sartre shows that emotions are not causal, so that doesn’t stand up); I can’t do anything as an individual (denial of responsibility through an aspect of facticity); I didn’t cause the occupation, therefore it’s not my place to fight it (same kind of excuse); I’ll lie low until it’s over and think of the freedom to come (failure to engage with the facts) and so on. He wanted to show that there are always possibilities and that, on the other hand, we can’t hide in our fantasy-lives.
While his view might be useful in an individualistic search for achievement, enabling a disparaging blame-mentality toward those who don’t ‘take responsibility for their fate’, that’s not the soil from which these views grew. Sartre was concerned with inequality and oppression – he saw how facticity could dramatically restrict the possibilities of some. This is why he supported the Communist party. Simone De Beauvoir, even more clearly, saw how facticity in the lives of women constrained their lives and aspirations. So it’s hard to see that he could approve of the narcissistic uses to which his philosophy has been put.
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