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Sartre, Bad Faith, and the Freedom We Deny

A waiter looking in the mirror
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is never more free, or more himself, than when he declares himself to be ‘Nobody’.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife living in 1950s California. She spends the morning baking a birthday cake for her husband, caring for her young son, and performing all the duties expected of a devoted wife and mother.

But all is not as it seems.

Beneath this picture of domestic contentment, something has begun to shift. Perhaps for the first time, Laura seems to experience her own life as though she were standing outside it. Later that day, she books into a hotel room. Alone at last, she lies on the bed reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. For a few precious hours, she escapes the life waiting for her outside the door.

Some years later, she vanishes without trace, abandoning her husband and young children and inventing a new life for herself in Canada. What she did is difficult to understand, or forgive. But it is not her decision that makes the story so compelling. It is the feeling that precedes it. Long before she acts, she has begun to look upon her own life as though it were not her own.

Many thoughtful people have experienced something similar.

Perhaps you are at a birthday party or sitting in a meeting when, suddenly, everything feels strange. You zoom out of the room and wonder, How did I end up here? Or perhaps it happens on the homeward commute or while changing a nappy in the middle of the night. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before necessity kicks in. But for that brief moment, you are no longer simply living your life. You are looking in on it.

It was precisely this human potential that fascinated the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For Sartre, human beings are unlike anything else in the natural world. A tree simply exists. A stone simply exists. But human beings are conscious not only of the world but also of themselves within it. We can step back from our own lives and ask questions that no other creature appears capable of asking: Who am I? How did I become this person? What now?

This capacity for self-reflection is both our highest freedom and our heaviest burden—for we are never wholly identical with the life we happen to be living. Had things been only slightly different, we would be living an altogether different life. Indeed, there are countless lives that we could have lived, and could still live.

Most of the time, however, we do our utmost to forget this unsettling truth. Sartre called this mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’.

Bad faith is not ordinary lying. We do not consciously deceive ourselves. Rather, we come to identify with the roles we occupy. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a husband, or a wife, forgetting that these are only the lives we happen to be living. We begin to mistake our lives for ourselves.

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. His every movement is a little too precise; his every smile, a little too practised. He is trying so hard to be a waiter that he forgets that he is first a free human being who happens to be waiting tables.

When I was a junior doctor, I too played at being a doctor—partly because it was what everyone expected, and what many of my patients needed. But because I had read Sartre as a teenager, I could sometimes catch myself doing it.

Like Laura Brown, I would suddenly become aware that my role was only a role. Laura had not ceased to love her husband or her son, nor had she forgotten her responsibilities towards them. But she could no longer identify with the life that she happened to be living. A gap had opened up between herself and her life.

Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to close that gap. They tell themselves that they have no real choice, that it is too late to change, that people depend on them, or that this is simply who they are. Often these rationalisations contain a good deal of truth. We are born into circumstances that we cannot simply wish away, and we acquire obligations that we cannot lightly discard.

Still, there is a world of difference between acknowledging our constraints and denying our freedom altogether. The first is maturity. The second is bad faith.

For Sartre, freedom does not mean doing whatever we feel like doing. Laura Brown is not some heroine of liberation. Her story is tragic because freedom and responsibility so often pull in opposite directions. Sartre’s point is not that we should walk away from our commitments whenever they become alien or burdensome, but that we should not simply endure them as though we had no choice in the matter.

That is why those fleeting moments of estrangement matter. When you suddenly wonder, How did I end up here?, you are not necessarily having a crisis. You are opening a window of choice and freedom.

We are something more than the lives we have cornered ourselves into. We could have been a million different people—and still could.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might also enjoy Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Inauthenticity involves pretending to be something other than one is and so, by implication, casting off the freedom to create, express, and fulfil one’s own self. Inauthenticity is often reinforced by sociocultural forces such as peer pressure and advertising, and is motivated by the subconscious desires to fit in, avoid criticism, and minimise or put off the existential anxiety associated with choice and responsibility. Examples include the teenager who acts ‘cool’, the person who takes an interest in something because others do, and the person who gets married because he has arrived at the ripe old age of 30, 35, or 40 years old.

The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls such inauthenticity mauvaise foie, ‘bad faith’. His paradigmatic example of bad faith is that of a waiter who does his utmost to conform to the archetype of the waiter, that is, to everything that a waiter should or is expected to be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to entertain or even recognise the multitude of other choices that are open to him, the waiter places himself at the mercy of his external circumstances. In this important respect, he is more akin to an object – ‘a waiter’ – than to a conscious human being who is able to transcend his existence to give shape to his essence. As Freud himself commented in his book, Civilization and its Discontents, ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

The concept of authenticity does not begin with Sartre or Freud, and stretches at least as far back as Plato. In the Greater Alcibiades, Socrates asks a young and foolish Alcibiades how one is to go about gaining self-knowledge. Socrates maintains that, if one were to say to the eye, ‘See yourself,’ the eye should look into a mirror to see itself. Since the pupil of the eye is just like a mirror, the eye could see itself by looking into an eye. Similarly, the soul can see itself by looking into the soul, and particularly into that part of the soul which has most to do with wisdom and which is therefore most akin to the divine. Self-knowledge, Socrates concludes, is, in fact, no other than wisdom; unless Alcibiades finds wisdom, he will never be able to know his own good and evil, nor that of others, nor the affairs of states. If Alcibiades were to become a statesman – as indeed he intends – without first having found wisdom, he would fall into error and be miserable, and make everybody else miserable too. What is more, he who is not wise cannot be happy, and it is better for such a person to be commanded by a superior in wisdom; since that which is better is also more becoming, slavery is more becoming to such a person. Socrates’ conclusions may seem abhorrent to modern sensitivities, but it does stand to reason that the person who unconsciously defines himself according to the likes and expectations of others and, by extension, of society also condemns himself to by far the most dishonourable kind of slavery, the slavery of the mind.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
…
– William Blake, London

As noted by the 20th century psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, the authentic person does not necessarily need to resemble some kind of freak outsider. If a person engages in a frank and thorough appraisal of the universal and personal implications of the prevailing social norms and then decides to adopt some or most of them en toute connaissance de cause, then he cannot be taxed with inauthenticity. Conversely, it should not be assumed that every eccentric is an authentic. Genuine authenticity lies in the method and not in the madness.

Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

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As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become. – Sartre

The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), the habit that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to recognise the multitude of other choices that are available to him, a person places himself at the mercy of the circumstances in which he happens to find himself. Thus, the person is more akin to an object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terminology, more akin to a ‘being–in–itself’ than to a ‘being–for–itself’. People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature as conscious human beings. However, to do so is in itself to make a choice, and thereby to acknowledge their freedom as conscious human beings.

Examples

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter should be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. However, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter must at some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter. Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date. The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

Implications

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems. In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles and such and such value systems, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of pretending to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices. Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.

Inauthenticity