Bad faith

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is not the everyday English sense of hidden motives but self-deception: a lie in which the same person is both deceiver and deceived.

Put simply Sartre's "bad faith" does not mean, as in everyday English, acting from hidden motives. It means self-deception: lying to yourself, so that you are both the liar and the one lied to.

In its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object.

Put simply Sartre: the commonest way of lying to ourselves is to plead that we had no choice, blaming fate, the laws of nature or "the way I am". That denies our freedom and treats us as mere things.

A rarer, second form of bad faith overlooks facticity: fantasizing that wishing makes anything possible, one makes a decision that is no real decision at all.

Put simply Sartre: a rarer way of lying to ourselves ignores the hard facts of our situation. Like a child demanding to fly to grandma's, we pretend wishing makes anything possible, so our "decision" is no real decision.

What makes bad faith possible is the translucency of consciousness: because it is neither opaque nor transparent, a person can get away with lying to themselves.

Put simply Sartre: because the mind is neither wholly hidden from itself nor wholly clear to itself, we can get away with lying to ourselves.

In the text In Being and Nothingness (1943; Barnes translation), Part One, ch. 2, Sartre presents "the total translucency of consciousness" as a difficulty for lying to oneself, since the liar and the one lied to are the same person.

Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity builds existentialist ethics around resisting bad faith, mauvaise foi: the pull toward escaping one's own freedom and the load of being a subject.

Put simply Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity builds an existentialist ethics around resisting "bad faith": the pull to escape our own freedom and the burden of being a self who must choose.

Beauvoir holds women partly responsible for their own subordination: too often they shrink in bad faith from freedom's burden, remaining the inessential and accepting the object role.

Put simply Beauvoir: women are partly responsible for their own subordination. Too often, lying to themselves, they shy away from the burden of freedom, stay secondary to men and accept being treated as objects.

The greengrocer lies twice. Feigning belief in communism is the shallow lie; the deeper one, Sartrean bad faith, is telling himself he is powerless when greengrocers keep the game going.

Put simply Shore: Havel's greengrocer, displaying a communist slogan, lies twice. Faking belief in communism is the shallow lie. The deeper one is Sartre's "bad faith," self-deception: telling himself he is powerless, when people like him keep the system running.