Bad Faith is Sartre's name for the mode of consciousness that flees its own freedom by treating itself as a fixed thing — self-deception that requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same thing.
bad-faith
Sartre's name for the mode of consciousness that flees its own freedom by treating itself as a fixed thing rather than the open activity it actually is — self-deception that requires simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same thing.
The problem it answers
How is self-deception possible? The straightforward case of deception is one in which one person lies to another: the deceiver knows the truth and conceals it from the deceived. Self-deception is more puzzling: the deceiver and the deceived are the same person, which seems to require that one and the same person simultaneously know and not know the same thing. Yet self-deception is undeniably a common feature of human life; people regularly hold beliefs whose falsity, on reflection, they would have to acknowledge they have access to.
Bad faith (French mauvaise foi) is Jean-Paul Sartre's name for this structurally peculiar mode of consciousness. Bad faith is not lying to others (which is unproblematic deception); it is the specific case of lying to oneself in a way that requires the simultaneous knowing-and-not-knowing that the analysis of self-deception must somehow explain. Bad faith is developed most extensively in Being and Nothingness Part I, Chapter 2 (1943), and is one of Sartre's most influential single contributions.
The core claim
The core claim has three parts.
Bad faith is the flight from one's own freedom. Consciousness, on Sartre's analysis, is structurally free — not in the political sense (freedom from external constraint) but in the ontological sense (consciousness is not a fixed thing but an open self-relation). The recognition of this freedom is anxiety-producing; bad faith is the mode in which consciousness flees the recognition by treating itself as if it were a fixed thing.
Bad faith takes two complementary forms. Either consciousness denies its transcendence (its open, self-projecting character) by identifying entirely with its facticity (its body, its role, its situation — I am nothing but a waiter, nothing but a woman, nothing but the role society has assigned me). Or consciousness denies its facticity by treating itself as pure transcendence, unconditioned by any of the actual circumstances of its existence. Both moves flee what Sartre takes to be the actual structure of human existence — the tension between transcendence and facticity that cannot be resolved on either side.
Bad faith is structurally peculiar but real. The puzzle of how self-deception is possible has no straightforward solution within a Cartesian framework that treats consciousness as transparent to itself. Sartre's account works by analyzing consciousness as fundamentally not transparent to itself — consciousness is the act of self-flight as much as it is the act of self-awareness, and the structural possibility of bad faith arises from this self-relation that is not a self-coincidence.
The waiter example
The most famous illustration of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a waiter in a Paris café who plays at being a waiter — his movements are slightly too quick, his bows slightly too deep, his recitation of the day's specials slightly too studied. The waiter is playing at being a waiter rather than simply being one.
What is happening, on Sartre's analysis: the waiter is treating his role as if it were a fixed identity that he simply is. But a human being cannot be a waiter the way a stone is a stone; the waiter is a free consciousness who has taken up this role and who could, in principle, do otherwise. The performance of the role with its slight over-emphasis is the manifestation of bad faith — the waiter is trying to convince himself (and the customers) that he is nothing but a waiter, that the role is his identity rather than something he chooses each moment to inhabit.
The example is meant to illustrate a structural feature of human existence: in any role we take up, we are always in danger of (and sometimes need) the slight self-deception of treating the role as fixed. The waiter is not a special case; the analysis applies wherever consciousness identifies with its role.
The woman on a date
A second canonical example in Being and Nothingness. A woman is on a date with a man who is gradually making clear his sexual interest; she allows him to take her hand, but pretends to herself that nothing is happening — her hand is just there, neither encouraging nor refusing, while she continues an abstract intellectual conversation as if the hand were not hers.
The structure: the woman is in bad faith because she is dividing herself into two — the transcendent self that continues the intellectual conversation, and the body whose situation with the man is treated as if it were the body of a thing rather than her own body. The flight from the freedom to either encourage or refuse takes the form of treating the bodily situation as if it were not her doing.
The example has been controversially read (some critics argue Sartre's analysis projects bad faith onto the woman where another reading would attribute it to the man's situation); the example illustrates the structure even if the specific case is contested.
The structure of the analysis
Sartre's analysis of how bad faith is possible: consciousness is not a thing that simply has properties (including the property of self-deception); consciousness is the activity of consciousness, the open self-relation in which consciousness is consciousness of something including consciousness of itself. This self-relation is not a coincidence (consciousness is not simply identical with itself); the gap or distance within consciousness is what makes bad faith possible.
In bad faith, consciousness uses one moment of itself to deny another moment. The waiter uses the moment of being-this-particular-person-playing-the-role to deny the moment of being-the-free-consciousness-that-could-do-otherwise. The woman uses the moment of being-the-intellectual-conversationalist to deny the moment of being-the-embodied-being-in-this-situation. Each move is structurally a use of consciousness against consciousness — not a simple identity of self with self, but a self-relation that is also a self-distance.
Common confusions
Bad faith is not the same as ordinary lying. Lying to others is straightforward deception; bad faith is the structurally peculiar case of self-deception. The two have different conditions of possibility and different analytic structures.
Bad faith is not pathological. It is not a special condition of unusual people; it is the ordinary mode of much human life. Sartre's analysis is that bad faith is structurally available to any consciousness and that most of us flee our freedom most of the time in some form.
Bad faith is not the opposite of authenticity in a simple sense. Authenticity is not the achievement of a state in which bad faith is permanently overcome; it is the continuing recognition of the conditions of bad faith and the continuing project of taking up one's freedom rather than fleeing it.
Live debates
The structural coherence of bad faith. The classical question: can the analysis of self-deception as simultaneous knowing-and-not-knowing be made coherent? Subsequent philosophers (Donald Davidson, Alfred Mele, others) have developed various accounts of self-deception that engage and modify Sartre's framework.
The application of bad faith to specific situations. The gendered example in Being and Nothingness has been controversially analyzed by feminist philosophers (especially through Beauvoir's extension of the existentialist framework). Whether Sartre correctly identifies bad faith in particular situations is contested.
Bad faith in psychotherapy and moral psychology. The continuing literature on self-deception in psychotherapy and moral psychology (Robert Trivers, Mele, Eric Funkhouser) engages the structural analysis without always accepting the full Sartrean framework.
Contemporary engagement
Major recent scholarly work includes Sebastian Gardner's Sartre's Being and Nothingness: A Reader's Guide (2009), the substantial work of Christina Howells, David Detmer's Sartre Explained (2008), and the relevant chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Sartre. The contemporary philosophical literature on self-deception (Alfred Mele's Self-Deception Unmasked, 2001) engages the Sartrean framework substantially even where it modifies the specific claims.
Further reading
- Sartre — the author of the doctrine
- Being and Nothingness — the major text
- Existentialism — the tradition
- Authenticity — the existentialist value bad faith flees
- Free Will — the freedom bad faith conceals
- de Beauvoir — the philosophical partner who extended the framework
This is a Pillar concept. Satellite concepts should link here as their parent.