Jean-Paul Sartre · Philosophy
If we have no fixed essence, then we are radically free - and Sartre means this almost without limit. The deepest threat to such freedom is not the tyrant but ourselves: <em>bad faith</em> (mauvaise foi), the self-deception by which we flee our freedom and pretend to be fixed things, playing roles and hiding behind ‘I had no choice.’
Once Sartre has denied that we have a fixed essence, a startling consequence follows: we are free, and we cannot stop being free. Because nothing about us is settled in advance, every situation leaves open the question of what we will make of it - and that openness is freedom. Sartre pushes this to an extreme that can seem outrageous. He says we are free even under the harshest constraints: the soldier ordered to attack is free to refuse and be shot; the prisoner is free in how he relates to his chains. Freedom for Sartre is not the same as power - it does not mean you can do anything - but it means that the meaning you give your situation, and your response to it, are always your own doing. There is no situation that chooses for you. Even not choosing is a choice. This is why, in his play No Exit, Sartre has a character realize there is no escape hatch from the human condition: we are stuck with our freedom, sentenced to it for life.
If we are inescapably free, why do so few of us feel free? Because, Sartre answers, we are forever fleeing our freedom - and the chief means of flight is bad faith (mauvaise foi), a peculiar lie we tell ourselves. An ordinary lie has two people: the deceiver, who knows the truth, and the deceived, who does not. But in bad faith I am both at once - I hide a truth from myself, conceal from myself what at some level I know. How is that even possible? It works because we are double beings: we have facticity (the brute facts about us - our past, our body, our situation) and transcendence (our freedom to surpass those facts, to be more than them). Bad faith plays these two against each other. Sometimes I treat myself as pure facticity, a fixed thing determined by my nature or past (‘I’m just shy, I can’t help it’); sometimes I treat myself as pure transcendence, denying the facts of my situation. Either way I deny that I am a free being who must take responsibility, and I do it precisely to escape the anguish of being free.
Bad faith is not an exotic pathology; Sartre thinks it is the ordinary texture of most of our lives, the standing temptation of any free being. We slip into it constantly: when we say ‘that’s just the way I am’ to excuse a habit we could change; when we hide behind ‘I was only following orders’ or ‘I had no choice’; when we let our role - parent, professional, patriot, victim - swallow us whole so that we no longer have to decide, but can simply be what the role prescribes. Each of these is an attempt to convert ourselves from an anxious, responsible freedom into a comfortable, settled thing. The appeal is obvious: bad faith relieves the vertigo of choice. If I am ‘just’ a coward, an addict, a creature of my upbringing, then I am off the hook - my failures are not my responsibility but my nature’s. The opposite of bad faith Sartre calls authenticity: facing the truth that we are free, owning our choices as ours, and refusing the comforting lie that we are fixed. Authenticity does not mean discovering and being your ‘true self’ - there is no such fixed self - it means lucidly accepting that you have no fixed self, and choosing in full awareness of your freedom and responsibility.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Sartre we are radically free, and that bad faith is the self-deception by which we deny that freedom - treating ourselves as fixed things or playing a role to avoid the anguish of choice. Explain the café waiter and the woman on the date, and what makes their attitude bad faith.
Leads to Epictetus.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.