What is bad faith according to existentialism?

Let's see what existentialist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre understood by "bad faith".

Human beings are free to do what we want, but we are not aware of it and we convince ourselves that we are at the mercy of circumstances.

This idea defended by existentialists such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is what is known as bad faith, a rather paradoxical concept.a rather paradoxical concept since it is choosing to consider that one does not have the capacity to make decisions. Let us understand it better below.

What is bad faith in existentialism?

"Bad faith" ("mauvaise foi" in French) is a philosophical concept that was coined by existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This term describes the strange but daily phenomenon in which people deny our absolute freedom, considering ourselves as the result of causes beyond our control, which prevent us from making free decisions.that prevent us from making free decisions.

It is the free decision to consider that we do not have freedom of decision, considering ourselves no more free than inert objects are.

The lies we believe

Bad faith is a form of lie, a deception that people make to themselves and that they end up believing..

Sartre tries to put his idea more clearly by distinguishing between two types of everyday lies. One of them we could call "plain lying". This is the typical behavior of deceiving others, of misrepresenting or not telling the truth. It is the lie related to the world of things, a type of behavior that we use in our day-to-day social relationships, believing that it will bring us some kind of benefit. We may also lie without realizing it, but the point is that this type of lie is the one we tell to other people.

The other typology of Sartrean lie is "bad faith", a bad faith but towards ourselves. This is the behavior we engage in in an attempt to hide from the unavoidable fact of our freedom, i.e., that we are radical beings.That is to say, that we are radically free beings, that we cannot run away from our own freedom, however small and apparently scarce it may seem to us.

It is true that there will be conditioning factors that reduce our options, but we will always have some kind of capacity to decide for ourselves. Despite this, people prefer to convince themselves that what we are and what we do is not the direct result of our decisions, but a series of consequences due to external factors such as social pressure together with some internal aspects such as our social role, personality or certain decision-making capacity.

In other words, the behavior of bad faith makes us believe that we are always at the mercy of circumstances.. It is in this sense that we would speak of self-cosifying ourselves, since people treat ourselves as if we were things, objects that are subject to the wills of elements external to them and that cannot decide what to do or what is going to happen to them on their own.

The fundamental feature of objects is that of not being subjects, of being nothing more than the will of external elements.that of being nothing more than the consequence of something external to themselves, of being neither owners nor authors of themselves.

This reality about objects is the same vision we apply to ourselves when we convince ourselves that we have not been able to make decisions and that what we are right now is not our responsibility, but the decision of destiny. This is precisely how we treat ourselves when we live in bad faith.

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The realms of bad faith

It is important to highlight two important domains of bad faith behavior: the realm of valuing who we are and the realm of our choices..

To understand the presence of bad faith when we value what we are it is necessary to highlight the essential thesis of existentialism. In this current of thought it is held that we are what we are as a consequence of our choices and, therefore, we have chosen to be as we are and all that we have or have done.

On this basis, there is no hidden potential or hidden talents in us that we have not yet tapped because it has not been possible for us to do so, but simply because we have decided not to tap them because we have decided to do so. we have not tapped into them because we have decided to do so.. This reality can be difficult to accept, especially when things do not go as we wanted or had planned and we cannot get used to the idea that they are not going to get better no matter how hard we try.

Because of this, and to ease our conscience and not face the fact that our failures are due to ourselves, what we tend to do is to try to blame how our life has gone on what others have done or said, as well as blaming our fate. We may also believe that the bad or undesirable thing that has happened to us was totally inevitable, that we could do absolutely nothing to stop it from happening.

Bad faith is also evident in the choice. For example, when we choose not to choose or when we give up making a decision or excuse ourselves by indicating that we cannot stop doing what we do, our conduct is in bad faith.

Sartre's examples

To try to make himself better understood, Sartre presents several examples about his idea of bad faith. Among them we can highlight that of the waiter and that of the young girl on a date.

In the example of the waiter, he presents him as a person whose movements and way of conversing are too much determined by his profession. His voice denotes an eagerness to please, carrying meals in a stiff, stiff manner. He shows an exaggerated, almost stereotypical behavior, typical of an automaton pretending to be a waiter. He assumes his role as a waiter so much that he forgets his own freedom, because before being a waiter he is a person with free will and no one can identify completely with his social role, in this case that of a waiter.

The other example is that of the young girl who finds herself on a first date with a guy .. The boy makes comments praising her beauty that have an obvious sexual connotation, but which the girl accepts as being directed at her non-corporeal self. At one point during the date, he takes her hand while the girl stands still, not rejecting the contact but not returning the gesture either. Thus, the girl does not respond, delaying the decisive moment. She considers his hand to be merely a thing. She takes neither the one nor the other option, staying with the third: doing nothing.

In these two examples Sartre argues that both waiter and girl act with "malice," in the sense that they both deny their own freedom through this very freedom. They both know that they can make choices on their own, but they reject it. In this sense, bad faith is paradoxical since, acting with "badness" a person is both conscious and, to some extent, unconscious of being free.

Philosophical implications

For Sartre, people can pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make decisions, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, that they are human beings.that is, that they are conscious human beings who really have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, professional and social roles and value systems.

By adopting certain pragmatic concerns or by adopting certain social roles and following a value system, a person can pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make decisions, but actually doing so is a decision in itself, that is, the decision to pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make decisions. Thus, as Sartre said, the human being is condemned to be free.